Red Pepper » Christine Haigh

Tenant troubles

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:58 +0000

In July last year, radical housing group Housing Solidarity took up the case of three private tenants in east London who found themselves stuck at the centre of a dispute between the landlord of their new flat and the letting agent, Victorstone Property Consultants. The landlord had changed the locks, leaving the would-be tenants without their new home or the £3,451 they’d paid for rent and deposit. While they managed to recover some of the money from the landlord, Victorstone had held on to around £1,200 that it refused to repay. The money was only returned after Housing Solidarity organised scores of people to call, email and fax Victorstone. Within two hours the company had caved in.
This is just one example of new groups using direct action casework, an organising model that had its roots in the unemployed workers movement of the Great Depression, when people organised to demand their basic needs were met by relief offices. Today, the model has been adopted by the London Coalition Against Poverty, whose members Hackney Housing Group and Haringey Solidarity Group’s housing action group have both won victories in cases where families were at risk of homelessness due to eviction by private landlords.
With sky-rocketing rents for what is often poor quality and insecure accommodation, and those on low incomes being hit by no fewer than seven different cuts to housing support, it’s no surprise private tenants are starting to fight back. But historically, private tenants have been notoriously badly organised, lacking the community links and a common and publicly-recognisable landlord.
And the problems of private tenant organising cannot be underestimated. Many private tenants don’t even know who their own landlord is, let alone whether there are any other tenants and if so where and who. Insecurity of tenure exacerbates the problem, as private landlords can easily evict ‘troublesome’ tenants.
Although there have long been a handful of private tenants organisations, the rise in activism has been driven mainly by newer grassroots groups with a younger demographic and new ways of organising, communicating and taking action. Instead of replicating the committee meetings, annual reports, and formal structures of traditional tenants groups, these new groups generally work with more open structures and have much greater propensity to use social media and direct action tactics, often based on individual struggles.
In May, concerned about the impact of housing benefit cuts on private tenants in the borough, the Haringey group organised a public event to bring people together. One of the outcomes was a specific focus on the problems faced by private tenants, inspiring actions such as a ‘community housing inspection’ of local letting agents, which exposed discrimination against housing benefit claimants, inflated fees, insecure tenancies and extortionate rents.
2012 also saw the establishment of the vibrant Edinburgh Private Tenants Action Group. This has already seen success after its targeting of letting agents over tenants’ fees led the Scottish government to clarify that all such fees are illegal in Scotland. Again tailoring action to tackle problems faced by their members, in July the group converged at the offices of DJ Alexander, some of them in TV cop costumes inspired by the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ video, and designated it a crime scene due to the illegal fees the agency was charging.
Similar creative tactics were adopted by the Hackney private renters’ group Digs and other housing campaigners, who held an action in December to coincide with the national day of action called by UK Uncut. More than 50 people shut down a branch of Starbucks for an hour to hold a ‘housewarming party’ highlighting the cuts’ impact on access to decent housing.
To date, most of the new groups have worked within existing structures, albeit in novel and often powerful ways, to deliver results. But there are clearly limits to this approach, and demands for reform, including rent controls, increased rights for tenants, such as greater security of tenure, and more stringent requirements of landlords, are already being made.
But for many campaigners there is also recognition that the problems faced by private tenants cannot be tackled in isolation. The private rented sector is an expensive way to house people and delivers the worst outcomes in terms of decency and security, with the exception of temporary accommodation.
So different groups are increasingly working together to call for more and better access to other housing tenures, particularly more social housing. They are situating calls for reform within a wider critique of the current housing system, and rejecting the market as a just or effective means of distributing access to this fundamental human right.
Illustration by Martin Rowson

Maria and her mangoes

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 04:05:29 +0000

‘A slightly-less-exploitative trade reform’ would be a more accurate title for this disappointing volume, which is only likely to be of interest if you’ve spent most of the past 15 years living under a rock. Reflecting the Northern power structures from which the initiative originates, this collection includes contributions from the great and good of the increasingly corporate Fairtrade world, charting its development over the past two decades.
Sadly, there is virtually no representation of producer perspectives in this compilation. Instead when I pick it up, the book falls open at a picture of ‘Maria and her mangoes’. As I read on, stereotypes are hardly challenged; there are frequent romantic and condescending depictions of hard-working producers struggling to overcome their poverty.
In fact, the book alternates between reading like a corporate social responsibility (CSR) report for Cadbury’s and a public relations exercise for the Fairtrade Foundation. The prize for the most entertaining claim in its pages goes to the Fairtrade Foundation’s Harriet Lamb for her assertion of Fairtrade’s contribution to world peace: Tropical Wholefood’s recent move to source raisins from Afghanistan.
It’s hard to imagine the intended audience, but the book repeatedly frustrates, finally broaching interesting subjects such as the contradiction between fair trade and developing countries’ dependence on export-orientated agriculture, only to quickly gloss over them or present a grossly simplified account.
Arguably, what the Fairtrade movement needs is rigorous debate around the process of mainstreaming that has taken place at an increasingly rapid pace in recent years, as well as a challenge to the current under-representation of producers within the decision-making structures of Fairtrade and a broader discussion of the inherent limitations of a consumer-based, rather than political, movement.
Instead, the aggressive mainstreaming strategy pursued by the Fairtrade Foundation and its international equivalents is consistently defended, while several of the contributors equate Fairtrade and trade justice. This reflects a gross misunderstanding of the initiative, utter naivety as to how a genuine transformation of the international trade system could be achieved, or a deliberate attempt to mislead innocent readers.
So in short, if you read Red Pepper, you probably won’t want to read this.

Have your steak and eat it

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:30:39 +0000

Remember that statistic about how it takes 100,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef? Or that livestock production is responsible for a greater contribution to climate change than transport? They are so frequently quoted that their basis is never questioned. In this dense but readable volume, former Ecologist editor Simon Fairlie does exactly that.
In what began as a personal quest to justify not giving up on his taste for meat, Fairlie argues that, in a future sustainable society, we can have our steak and eat it – although we might have to take it in turns.
The book’s central thesis is that a low, ‘default’ level of livestock, where animals are used for what they’re good at – namely disposing of food residues and in return producing a range of useful stuff, including food, fibre and manure – can be part of a sustainable food system. Moreover, a sustainable system that doesn’t include some domesticated animals has a whole new set of problems to deal with in providing fertility for arable production and a varied year-round diet that doesn’t rely on fossil-fuelled transport to deliver it from the other side of the world.
Along the way, Fairlie demolishes a host of myths, including the water inefficiency of meat production (it turns out that your two pounds of beef only requires that much water if it’s fed on irrigated feed from the Californian desert). He also challenges the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s famous statistic that livestock generates 18 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which Fairlie argues confuses one-off emissions from land-use change with on-going emissions from production.
In doing so, he illustrates the bias of policy in favour of urban over rural patterns of settlement. He argues that this is a prejudice that is evident not just in planning policy the world over but even in the focus of climate change mitigation efforts on methane, a potent but relatively short-lived greenhouse gas largely generated by land-based activities, at the expense of the more stubborn carbon dioxide mainly arising from the fossil-fuelled activities of urban consumers.
The book thinks big. Fairlie’s essay ‘Can Britain feed itself?’, previously published in The Land magazine (its regular readers might recognise one or two other chapters too), finds its way into the book, and is the basis for much of the thinking behind it. What, he asks, would Britain – and other temperate countries – look like under the extremes of various combinations of agricultural production? You can take your pick between vegan chemical, stock-free permaculture or organic with livestock (or any other possible permutation) and figure out which looks most like a world you’d like to see.
It’s a new look at a sometimes bizarre range of topics, from the relative merits of wheat and chestnuts (which used to be a staple in southern France), to the role of animals in food security. Fairlie spells out the importance of livestock for the landless (a way of sequestering whatever scraps of feed come your way, with harvesting on demand) and the way they provide a buffer for a population’s grain stocks. But in the context of his focus on temperate countries such as the UK, his promotion of the use of animal traction has no doubt raised a few eyebrows, however convincing his arguments.
While Fairlie clearly has an agenda, he doesn’t shy away from subjecting both sides of the argument to scrutiny. Perhaps most interesting is his detailed knowledge of Britain’s agrarian history: the book is peppered with snippets from thinkers on food and feed from days gone by. In essence, the book is a wake-up call for us to realise how disconnected we are from the land, and why it might be worth getting back to nature before we start planning our collective future.
Of course, we live in a world of compromises, and none of the scenarios in Fairlie’s thought experiments and back-of-the-envelope calculations is ever likely to be realised. But then Fairlie was never under the impression that the world was going to turn vegan. He accepts animal-free lifestyles as an option but rejects them as a global prescription. The real debate, his book recognises, is about how we produce food, and with key players like the UN demonstrating a distinct bias towards the type of intensive livestock production that sees animals being fed on increasingly valuable grain and generating huge waste problems that their surrounding environment does not have the capacity to deal with, it’s a battle we might all do well to be prepared for.
The book is unself-consciously anthropocentric, and Fairlie doesn’t go near animal rights issues, which makes much of it irrelevant for many vegans. But anyone for whom eating animal products raises issues of social justice and sustainability should certainly have a read – it’s a refreshing new take on the increasingly polarised debates about the role of animals in our food system.