This weekend, while commentators yawped on about local democracy, and Ed Miliband vowed he’d close the chasm between the rich and the rest of us by a whole couple of centimetres, a bunch of young women in east London just got on and did it.
They began with a Sunday afternoon fun day, the mothers laying on facepainting and some Sister Sledge. What jarred was the location: the Carpenters estate, next to the Olympic village, was long ago cleared of most of its residents as Newham council tried to flog the land. Except the last deal fell through, leaving around 600 council homes empty. This is in a borough where more than 24,000 households are waiting for somewhere to live, and where, last winter, the shopping precinct was full of rough sleepers.
Amid boarded-up flats and abandoned gardens the party continued, punctuated by cries of, “These homes need people. These people need homes”. Then at about four o’clock, the hosts hoiked themselves up into one of the flats, prised off the boards and invited in guests. At the time of writing the mums are still inside, having converted a decent, needlessly empty home (power shower, new cooker and electrics still on) into a community centre – and a concrete reproach to the capital’s housing crisis.
Almost everything about the Focus E15 Mothers has this kind of filmic quality. They are the 29 single mums who were turfed out of their hostel just over a year ago when funding cuts hit; the homeless group who were advised by council officers to leave their families and friends in London and move with their kids 200 miles away, to low-rent parts of Birmingham and Manchester. Now they’re the bunch who fought and won – and are all still living in Newham.
Should the British film industry ever stop making affectionate obituaries of the working class – Pride, Brassed Off, Made in Dagenham – and document current struggles instead, the Focus E15 Mothers would be a deserving subject.
These women, none of them over 25, have taken the narratives set out by suited officials and journalists and flipped them upside down. Others doubtless wrote them off as anonymous benefit mums. But they’ve shown themselves to be articulate, successful activists. They were once treated as a problem, to be shuttled between temporary accommodation; now they’re pushing solutions to the real issue – preventing London from becoming a city in which the rich live while the rest of us are bussed in to serve them.
These self-aware women have heard all the abuse. “We’ve been called sluts, told to shut our legs,” says Jasmin Stone, a Focus E15 leader. But despite suffering depression, in-between the days in which all she did was cry, Stone looked for ways to ensure she and her daughter could stay in the area where her family had lived for more than 100 years.
This story is really about how the apolitical get radicalised. Because first the 29 mothers did as told: registering as homeless, spending days phoning all the landlords on the three-page sheet given to them as the sole help by the council. When that didn’t work, they chanced upon a revolutionary communist market stall and enlisted their help in formatting the petition. They set up their own stall, which can still be seen every Saturday in Stratford centre. They drew in help and information from other campaigners, passers-by, the internet.
Then they began storming council offices. An impromptu party was held in the luxury show flat of the housing association that was evicting them. They got into the local media. At which point it turned out that their eviction notices were “a mistake” – all 29 of them. For the time being, they could stay in their hostel – and the council would help house them locally.
Such a facing-down would be remarkable enough for any campaign, but Stone’s colleague Sam Middleton describes it only as a “part-victory”. She points out that they are all renting privately, paying nearly £1,000 a month to live in grim conditions. When Middleton moved in with her baby, she found the skeleton of a mouse. Pulling away the drawers she saw a three-inch gap between the floor and the walls. During the thunderstorms of the past week the roof has begun leaking. Yet she doesn’t want to complain for fear of not having her tenancy renewed.
For more and more people in London, this is what winning in the housing market now means: the right to spend a few more months in a flat that may be damp and strewn with rodent carcasses. As Focus E15 argue, the ultimate answer is more public housing. Yet Newham mayor Robin Wales wants instead to bring in 3,000 more private rental homes. Meanwhile, the Carpenters estate lies practically empty, a ghost town where people should be living.
During the Olympics, Wales’s officers rented out the tower blocks as filming locations to the BBC and Al-Jazeera; they allowed Gillette to hang a giant advertising banner from another. But the idea of using them as long-term housing for the local homeless is apparently a no-no. And when the Focus E15 Mothers arranged to hold their fun day on the estate, a senior Newham official warned some of the remaining residents that it would bring in security guards. I’ll bet that very soon, the heavies will descend on that one occupied flat to turf out the women and put the boards back up.
Perhaps, like me, you look at the party conferences and despair at the minute positioning that passes as politics. In which case, turn your gaze to a flat on an abandoned council estate in east London. Thanks to a group of self-taught, radicalised women, real political action is happening there. We should support it.
