Red Pepper » Lorna Stephenson

Revolutionary rehearsals

admin — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:53:52 +0000

Zawe Ashton in Clean Break’s recent production There Are Mountains
Stepping under the hot lights of a stage in front of an audience and performing, as yourself, a dramatisation of your personal experiences of oppression, trauma or conflict would strike most people as a terrifying prospect. Yet several theatre groups around the country are doing just that in order to ‘give a voice to the voiceless’, create forums of debate and compassionate communication, and ultimately to advance social change for those whose stories are usually invisible or marginalised.
One of the most prominent examples of empowering theatre approaches is Theatre of the Oppressed, founded by the Brazilian playwright, activist and theatre pioneer Augusto Boal, who left a worldwide legacy after his death in 2009. Forum Theatre is one form of Boal’s work, along with Invisible Theatre and Image Theatre, which were designed to create democratic arenas for interaction and growth. Forum performances involve dramatising an oppressive situation familiar to the cast’s real‑life experiences in a small play. The play is then performed a second time, during which audience members – ‘spect-actors’ in Boal’s terminology – can shout ‘Freeze!’ and take to the stage themselves, improvising alternative courses of action in the hope of taking the play to a less oppressive ending. The degrees of success of different ideas are discussed by the audience.
The new strategies can be used to empower participants in their real lives. For social movements the exercises can highlight potential strategies, developed in a collaborative and community-led setting. Performances are not the only aim of the form – Boal also developed drama exercises encouraging openness, exploration and the building of trust.
Forum for change
Forum Theatre is widely studied and ‘study-able’, with Boal’s books full of catchy quotes such as the famous statement that: ‘Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!’ Yet its application in a pure form is rare in the UK. One exception is Cardboard Citizens, which has become an established charity working with people affected by homelessness in London. It is one of the leading practitioners of Forum techniques (Boal visited frequently over the course of 15 years) along with offering more traditional services such as workshops and training. It takes Forum plays, performed by members who have experienced homelessness, straight to the doors of the ‘hard-to-reach’ audiences, on an annual hostel tour – a mode through which many new members end up becoming involved.
Catherine Pinhorn, a trainer and practitioner of Forum Theatre with training organisation Change-X-Change, who has studied under Boal and is currently working with homeless groups herself, points out that Forum Theatre exercises are used in many educational and corporate settings. Although Boal himself encouraged adaptation of the form to suit particular participants, she sees the use of Forum to impart predetermined messages a dilution of the strengths of the approach, which essentially centres on truth and human agency.
‘I think it literally provides a forum in which [the individual] can be heard,’ she says. ‘Lots of people in our society are not listened to. That they don’t feel heard is actually a reflection of what’s going on. There is far too much glossing over everything. And people then turn in, and they don’t bother to communicate.’
Although local authority budget restraints are hindering the chances of setting up groups in hubs such as community centres, which Pinhorn is a proponent of, the potential of Forum Theatre to redefine conversations in communities from the grassroots is being explored by groups such as the Brighton Forum Theatre Collective. The collective is now into its second season after forming last year. Dee O’Halloran is one of the co‑founders. Like most of the group, she does not have a drama background, but was ‘really inspired’ after taking a short Forum Theatre course out of interest.
‘We just thought, this could be really beneficial to people,’ she says. The collective’s last performance, Beyond Care, explored issues of disempowerment in the workplace and concerns about attitudes towards social care for the elderly – a story based on the experiences of one of its members. Its next project is still in the early stages of development and may be performed to a wider audience in the city’s next Fringe Festival.
Activist stance
Other theatre projects have a more overtly activist stance, such as Clean Break, an organisation established by two female prisoners in 1979. They sought to ‘bring the hidden stories of imprisoned women to a wider audience’ and highlight injustices in the criminal justice system’s treatment of women. Their plays have explored themes of addiction, trafficking and the difficulties of reintegrating into life outside the prison walls.
Imogen Ashby, who has worked with Clean Break for more than 10 years and is now its head of engagement, directed its recent production, There Are Mountains, about the theme of release, which was written by Chloë Moss and performed by eight prisoners alongside actor Zawe Ashton, known for her part in Channel 4’s Fresh Meat. She explains that although there are both theatre professionals and offenders/ex-offenders involved, the heart of the stories is always about real experiences of the criminal justice system: ‘It’s why we do what we do.’ To begin the process of producing There Are Mountains three days were spent with women in Clean Break’s founding prison, HMP Askham Grange, asking what they felt it was important for audiences to know about the theme of ‘release’.
Clean Break has taken its political message on tour by performing at events such as Scotland Yard’s trafficking conferences and as part of the White Ribbon Campaign events in Scotland, which highlighted violence towards women. Another tour was directed at magistrates and sentencers, focusing on the impact of short-term sentences and alternatives to custody.
The performances have a unique ability to challenge preconceptions. Ashby quotes the reaction of the governors who had watched There Are Mountains and said after that ‘even though they had worked in the prison service for over 20 years, they learnt things they hadn’t thought about.’
Peace-building
In Northern Ireland, theatre is being used as a method of healing, reconciliation and peace-building by giving a human voice to the Troubles from both sides of the conflict through Theatre of Witness, a form developed by Teya Sepinuck. Since 1986 Sepinuck has been creating performances in her native US with diverse groups such as homeless people, refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse and prisoners, including ‘lifers’. Four years ago she began a residency at the Derry Playhouse, during which she has produced plays addressing the burden of the conflict’s legacy for those whose lives have, in one way or another, been shaped by it.
Although the Troubles have long been a subject of theatre, the Theatre of Witness plays were set apart by the directness and honesty of its performers, who perform personally rather than mediated through playwrights and fictionalisation. Her process is based on extensive interviews with participants, from which a script is developed. This is designed to mirror their own words, which they then perform on stage as themselves. The goal is not just to tell stories of people that wouldn’t normally be heard, but also ‘to find the medicine in the stories, which for me means, “Where is the point of healing? Where is the point of transformation, the point of redemption?”’ says Sepinuk.
The emphasis on openness, in the context of post-conflict Northern Ireland, was ‘ground-breaking’, according to James Greer, a former combatant who performed in the 2009 production We Carried Your Secrets. The experience, he says, was deeply challenging, confronting his fears to speak of a past that felt ‘taboo’. In the end the performances had a lasting positive impact on him and the other performers: ‘For all of us it lifted a weight off us, lifted the weight of the past off our shoulders.’
Audiences too were deeply affected. ‘It was medicine for the soul for a lot of people,’ says Greer. He recently took part in a delegation for Theatre of Witness to the European parliament, where extracts of the productions were performed to assembled heads of state.
The profound impact is one Sepinuck has seen repeatedly in her experiences of doing Theatre of Witness, and her appraisal of the art form could be applied to many other empowering theatre projects. ‘I think the beauty of theatre is that it’s a group process of bearing witness. It’s almost like a group catharsis and there’s something very powerful about witnessing together,’ she explains. ‘It’s different from opinions, it’s different from discussion, it’s different from political discourse, it’s different from the news, it’s different from facts. Hopefully it’s penetrating at a deeper, more complex nature.’

Squat rot: plans to extend squatting ban

admin — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:50:34 +0000

‘It is true that some of those who are homeless have squatted but this does not make them squatters. A typical squatter is middle class, web-savvy, legally minded, university-educated and, most importantly, society-hating.’
Mike Weatherley, Tory MP for Hove

Not content with having made it illegal for homeless people to put a roof over their heads in empty residential properties, the same people who brought us last year’s ban on squatting are now trying to extend it to empty commercial properties too. Fired up with the same sort of prejudiced misinformation that formed the backdrop to the original campaign to criminalise squatters, Mike Weatherley has tabled an early day motion in parliament to this effect. It had gathered 24 signatures as Red Pepper went to press, including the Labour MPs Paul Flynn and Mary Glindon and the Liberal Democrats’ Mike Hancock.
While the sheer stupidity of some statements from supporters of the ban is almost comical (another from Weatherley on squatters: ‘these people are anti-capitalists and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it’), the consequences of the new law are no laughing matter. Campaigners such as SQUASH, (Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes) are still fighting to highlight the real issues at stake since section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act came into force last September.
The opening quote from Weatherley was made to the local paper The Argus, in response to claims that the law he had so keenly promoted had resulted in its first fatality. Daniel Gauntlett, a 35 year-old homeless man in Kent, froze to death in February after police warned him not to enter an empty bungalow, due for demolition, on the doorstep of which he later died.
So far, 33 people have been arrested under the new law, which makes it a crime to ‘trespass’ into a residential property with the intention of living there, punishable by up to six months in prison and a £5,000 fine. Ten were convicted, with three receiving custodial sentences, while research by squatting support networks such as Advisory Service for Squatters, SQUASH and the Squatters’ Legal Network has identified at least 108 people who have been displaced after being threatened with prosecution by police. Given that accurate figures are not readily available – many police forces are treating the offence as non-recordable – this is just the tip of what many groups working with homeless people believe could be a very big iceberg.
What is clear is that in contrast to the images of ‘home stealing’ squatters conjured up in the imaginations of the media and politicians – caricatures resting on prejudiced portrayals of eastern European migrants and ‘feral’ middle-class youth – the law has disproportionately affected homeless and vulnerable people. This is exactly what opponents of the law, including homeless charities such as Crisis, Shelter and the Simon Community, had predicted.
Of the three people jailed for squatting, all were genuinely homeless, vulnerable, and in one case struggling with substance abuse problems. As the SQUASH report The Case Against S144, recently presented in the House of Commons, summarised: ‘As expected, a law that was introduced to “protect home owners” is, ultimately, putting homeless people in jail simply for trying to avoid rough sleeping.’
The report is backed by lawyers, homeless charities, academics and MPs. The broader campaign includes MPs such as John McDonnell, who has tabled an early day motion to repeal S144. A chorus of 40 legal experts, most recently in a letter published in the Guardian, has reiterated the fact that previous laws already protected home owners and intended occupiers. There was no need to introduce additional criminal sanctions, and no justification for extending them further.
‘There is no evidence that the law is being used to protect home owners, which it was claimed the law was for. No one has been arrested for squatting someone else’s home; it’s been for squatting empty properties,’ says SQUASH campaigner Gianni Barlassina. ‘What we’ve been saying all along is that squatting is a homelessness issue, not a criminal issue. It should be treated for what it is.’

If they can do it, we can too – cleaners get organised

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Photo: LL28 Photography
A crowd has gathered outside the British Medical Association (BMA) headquarters in London. Red flags fly in the wind as lively demonstrators hand leaflets to passers-by. Campaign literature explains their reasons. Despite the BMA being a trade union and campaigning body, the cleaners of the buildings from which it functions are subcontracted to a company that pays a poverty wage of £6.08 per hour. They are part of the army of thousands of cleaning staff who serve the capital in poorly-paid and insecure jobs for little-known contract cleaning companies.
The BMA outsources the cleaning of its buildings to the global ‘facilities management’ company Interserve. It offers the perennial outsourcing excuse that as a client it has no responsibility for the conditions of those employed by Interserve. In turn Interserve blames poverty pay on the contract conditions set by its clients. It forms a cycle of diminished responsibility.
Yet despite the argument that the money for pay rises can’t be found in such a highly competitive market, organised cleaners – and there has been a momentous increase in organisation in recent years – won’t back down. The fight is a moral one.
In the case of Interserve, the company recorded profits of £65 million last year; its directors shared a pay pot of £4 million. It has found itself taken to employment tribunals time and time again for pocketing staff’s holiday pay and for unlawful deductions in wages. Its chairman, incidentally, is Lord Blackwell, a Tory peer.
Hidden and ignored
‘A lot of these workers are hidden from public view and the companies like it that way. These workers really exist in the dark,’ says Stuart Dobson*, a regional organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union, which has been at the centre of several cleaners’ campaigns. ‘That’s another thing about the demonstrations – a demonstration’s not as powerful a tactic as a strike obviously but it’s very empowering to workers who feel hidden, who feel ignored.’
Many are migrant workers with insecure immigration status or language limitations, who do not have a support network in the UK – something that companies in the sector exploit. Stories abound about excessively hard work, cuts, dodgy contracts and long hours. Companies have been accused of a ‘bullying’ mentality.
One of the biggest problems is pay. Poverty pay has always existed but rising living costs are resulting in worse living conditions. The recent VAT increase has been compounded by significant price rises for necessities such as utilities and transport, particularly in London where fares have gone up substantially. Meanwhile, benefit cuts for in-work claimants will squeeze many low-paid workers even further. For the many working taxpayers with no recourse to public funds – mainly migrant workers – even the limited relief of in-work benefits is unavailable.
Suzanne Fenno*, a cleaner in London, describes the realities of life on the minimum wage: ‘You sit on a train, and you see people who are earning more than you . . . This is a very expensive town. We have a workforce who are unable get a travelcard, that can’t put food on the table for the kids. There are people who can’t come to work because they haven’t got the means to come.’
Big issue for unions
Organising low-paid workers has become a big issue for the larger unions. The Justice for Cleaners campaign involved Unite, Unison and the GMB, who had learned from the experience of the Justice for Janitors movement in the US. The Latin American Workers Association (LAWA) has also been very active since the movement began.
Union activity has been closely aligned with the Living Wage Campaign of Citizens UK (locally London Citizens), and campaigning has led to a string of successes. The Greater London Authority is a living wage employer and calculates the living wage rate annually. It currently stands at £8.30 per hour in London and £7.20 nationwide. Tube cleaners organised with the RMT transport union and in 2010 all London Underground cleaners, regardless of their contractor, won the living wage. Thirteen different London universities are now paying cleaners a living wage. Other victories include signing up London hospitals and universities, major city financial firms and making the 2012 Olympics pay the living wage.
Such successes have challenged assumptions about union organising. Once the outsourcing battle was lost many unions decided they were unable to represent contracted staff. Some of the poorest paid employees, such as cleaners, were denied union membership, facilities and staff time. Continued outsourcing has meant that unions are being forced to find ways to organise with all employees if they wish to remain a relevant force in public sector institutions.
Some union reps already recognised the moral, as well as the strategic, imperative for organising with outsourced workers. At London Metropolitan University a pay review in 2010 provided an opportunity to demand a living wage for all workers. Management agreed to meet with cleaners, catering and security staff, who were all on poverty pay, and conceded to Unison’s demands for a living wage.
At the time of this victory relatively few of the workers affected were unionised. But those cleaners and caterers who got involved continued to organise on the back of this success and membership rapidly increased. Ninety per cent of catering staff are now in Unison and they have since achieved further pay increases for some staff.
In March cleaners at London Met took part in their first public demonstration. They were taking action in support of their colleague Stephane Marais, who was suspended after he walked out of a meeting with management because there was no union representative present. Recognising this as an attack on their recent unionisation, cleaners stated they were ‘all Stephane’ and wore masks with his face at the demo. Stephane was swiftly reinstated.
Similar successes have been achieved at SOAS and the University of East London. At the University of London’s Senate House, where negotiations to secure missing overtime payments and a living wage dragged on for months, cleaners organised their own unofficial walk out. They were supported by local Unison activists, if not by the union. This action resulted in them winning the living wage and back pay.
Sustained organising
Max Watson, chair of Unison’s London Metropolitan University branch, says the key to success was building relationships of trust. Long term alliances have given previously unorganised workers the chance to build up their own activist base, elect representatives and become self-sufficient: ‘There are a variety of experiences but it’s been most effective where organising has been on a sustained basis. There are places where the living wage was won but activists left no legacy of unionisation, so the wins could be undermined. Winning and moving on doesn’t work.’
Cleaners are now proactively fighting for further improvements. At SOAS they have been demanding access to pensions, holiday and sick pay, the same basic rights as in-house staff. Low paid workers organising with the RMT are calling for an increase in the London living wage to £10 per hour and for cleaners with contractor ISS to be brought in-house when the contract expires in March 2013.
Despite the advances made by unions there are still many cleaners who receive poverty pay. A recent campaign against John Lewis showed discrepancies exist even within companies. Cleaners at the Oxford Street branch secured a pay rise after strikes and demonstrations gained media coverage but now staff at other branches are asking why the benefits haven’t extended to them.
Recognising the gaps in cleaner organising, the IWW and now the Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) have started organising with cleaners, arranging protests outside the Old Bailey, London Guildhall, Société Générale and Thomson Reuters week after week.
A campaign has been started at the flagship Peter Jones store in Sloane Square, also part of the John Lewis partnership. A series of meetings have been held with the management by IWW workers demanding pay equal to what Oxford Street workers now receive. They turned to the IWW because, as one cleaner put it, ‘We think they can help us out, because they helped them over there to get to where they are at the moment.’
Campaigns have not been easy – striking and holding demonstrations and sit-ins is risky for employees. In recent years unions have fought for reinstatement of workers sacked for union activity. In other cases, such as at Société Générale, employers have given with one hand, agreeing to a living wage, while taking away with the other, in the form of cuts to staff and increased working hours. A new campaign was instigated to fight the changes.
Immigration status
Both the IWW and the IWGB are committed to solidarity with all workers regardless of immigration status. They seek to foster community links through social and cultural events and self-help initiatives around language, immigration or housing help. Other unions have also recognised the challenges facing migrant workers. Some branches of Unison have paid for language lessons for their members in recognition of the problems even highly skilled workers can face if they don’t speak English.
Some employers have counter-attacked with alleged collusion with the UK Border Agency (UKBA). Members of the IWW have experienced deportation threats, dawn raids and going into workplace meetings only to find UKBA officers waiting for them.
Stuart Dobson says UKBA’s apparent role in policing workers (see page 10) is symptomatic of the border regime: ‘It’s intended to keep people frightened. It’s intended as a mechanism to stop people organising. That is how they’re using it.’
The sector is being changed, target by target, but it’s a slow process. The cleaners’ campaigns have not halted what the PCS union aptly described as employers’ ‘grotesque race to the bottom’. Cleaners at the British Museum, who organised with PCS and Unite, went on strike in October over plans to contract out their work.
Despite the continued outsourcing of low paid workers, the cleaners’ movement has made significant gains and in the process reignited trade unionism. Real success will come if this is replicated in other low paid sectors without a tradition of union representation. As Stuart Dobson says: ‘We are seeing bigger sections of the working classes call for more militant action, call for economic action. And the thing with the cleaners is that their bravery is absolutely inspirational. You’re dealing with people on the lowest pay, lowest job security, outsourced, contracts changing all the time. What I think you’ll see is other groups of workers following suit and saying, “Well if they can do it, we can do it as well.”’
* Names have been changed

Care in crisis

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:00:20 +0000

Illustration: Hey Monkey Riot – www.eddbaldry.co.uk
In many ways, the elderly care sector is an example of what Conservative policy-making aims towards. Dominated by private companies with no financial regulation (and many links to the Tories), what is left of state provision is rapidly dwindling. Those with the means to pay for their own care do so – often with a lifetime of savings and their home – while receiving no state support. Local authorities are continuing to freeze the amount of support given to those who can’t, even though current rates are far below most independent care homes’ fees. This means families must meet the shortfall.
Inconveniently for the Tories, the result of privatisation is not efficiency and innovation, nor choice and value for service users. It’s chaos, blighted by inadequate care provision and instability.
The estimated £1 billion in cuts to adult social care that have occurred since Osborne full-throttled his austerity programme, along with the further £1 billion expected over the next two years, have inevitably worsened services. Demographic changes mean elderly care will be an increasingly important, and expensive, issue. Last year’s report from the Dilnot Commission on drastic funding changes, which was intended to create a more sustainable and fairer system for service users, was recently dismissed by the coalition in its social care white paper as too expensive. The government, like others before it, refuses to engage with the chronic funding crisis, while the care system fails and impoverishes vulnerable elderly people.
Cuts passed on to local authorities by central government since the last spending review have caused a raft of closures, and outsourcing of the remaining council-run homes and day centres. Local authorities are shouldering the burden of austerity, and with it the backlash from unpopular decisions.
Loneliness and isolation
A Unison survey on day centre provision carried out earlier this year found that 57 per cent of respondents reported closures to services and over two-thirds saw an increase in charges for attendance, transport and meals. This is compounded by a fall in pensioners’ incomes through other factors such as fuel payment cuts and the withdrawal of the age-related tax code. In addition, over half of day centre staff said their pay and conditions had changed for the worse.
Matthew Egan, Unison’s assistant national officer on local government, says the impact on vulnerable older people is severe. Access to council-run centres is being restricted to those with the greatest need, and social isolation is no longer enough: ‘It’s loneliness and isolation that people are going to be suffering from more and more in our communities as a consequence.’ While some councils have said the savings will be passed over to individuals’ personal budgets, and will therefore give more ‘choice’ to people, the result is that voluntary sector services cannot continue because they rely on local authority grants to pay for costs such as rent and wages.
Marie*, a senior support worker in a charity-run day centre, explains that the service she works for had to raise thousands of pounds to keep going after local authority grants were drastically reduced. To achieve it, the staff worked evenings and weekends doing unpaid fundraising. At the same time, charges were raised, which meant many people could not afford to attend. Marie describes how staff have been overstretched and elderly people excluded from the service. ‘A lot of older people generally live alone and have no contact with anyone, other than say family or carers, and their health both mentally and physically can deteriorate rapidly. I believe day services for older people to be essential for their welfare . . . I have personally seen many successful stories of older people coming to our service, scared, alone and timid, only to blossom and become the life and soul of the party!’
The misnomer of choice
In Bristol, the Lib Dem city council recently passed a motion to close all but two council-run homes, with those being retained for dementia sufferers, and seven day centres. Local resistance fronted by the Bristol and District Anti-Cuts Alliance (BADACA) has gained momentum. More than 100 people lobbied the council meeting at which the final decisions were passed – after a laughable ‘consultation’ process in which the choices given were closure, closure or closure.
Jeremy Clarke, BADACA’s organising secretary, describes the mood in the care homes: ‘People who live in the council care homes like to live there, they feel that they paid for it through their taxes and the welfare state.’ Campaigners are suspicious of the council’s arguments that the process is simply a modernisation of the service, and that not-for-profit organisations and charities will tender for the new, independent contracts. In a context of scarce resources, it’s the large organisations that are likely to win such contracts.
The government buzzwords of ‘personalisation’ and ‘empowerment’ are used to argue that home care is always preferable to residential. In reality, it’s about economics: home care is cheaper. Yet, as Matthew Egan stresses, the home care sector is in no position to pick up the slack. ‘It puts more pressure on the workforce and the workforce is getting the blame, the people delivering the care, even though they’re getting stretched and stretched, on really bad pay and really bad terms and conditions.’ Time and wages have been cut to the bone, and some staff are reporting that they will stay for extra time with clients, past the allotted 15 minutes, without pay just to ensure they are receiving adequate care – while they themselves are on minimum wage.
Policies aimed at enabling people to remain at home, such as training courses to help them live independently, have benefited some. But they are being used in a blanket fashion to the detriment of many of the most vulnerable. As such, any talk of ‘choice’ is a misnomer. Lynne*, an elderly people’s social worker in the south‑east, says: ‘Yes, they talk about empowerment but we have to fight to get people into homes now – really, really fight. There’s actually a limit on how many people we can place in residential homes a month, I think 25 in each area. Even if people have extreme dementia and are wandering the streets, it’s not guaranteed we’d get them into a home.’
Care for profit
As council-run homes close their doors, the people made to relocate find themselves in the private sector. The landscape of the £10 billion independent care sector, and the character of organisations that make up its patchwork coverage, are complex. Inherent problems in the sector are far wider than the rare horror stories of institutional abuse that have featured in recent investigations, such as that by Panorama.
The common thread is the means by which they achieve cost-effectiveness: they pay less. The staff work longer hours with fewer benefits, and skeleton staffing means carers can struggle to find time to provide the individualised care they’d like to. Cuts in the rates of support given to local authority‑funded residents have exacerbated these issues.
Lynne emphasises that the problem stems from our cultural attitudes towards caring: ‘There needs to be a drastic rethink . . . The majority of carers are not valued. They’re not valued by their peers, by society, and they’re not valued by the staff.’ She suggests raising the wage level and the qualifications needed to work in the sector. Unison is running a campaign to recruit care workers into the union, believing low levels of unionisation are reflected in the poor terms and conditions the workforce endures.
The impact of funding freezes from local authorities has also manifested in poorer quality food and other provisions and equipment. Lynne says she’s seen residents suffering from discomfort and skin flare-ups because homes are buying poor quality incontinence pads.
Driven by profit, many – but not all – homes have a money-grabbing ethos. While fees for home places vary enormously (from several hundred pounds per week to thousands), this doesn’t necessarily mean the more costly care is of better quality than more affordable homes. ‘To be honest if I drive up to a home and it’s expensive-looking, and it’s got flower beds and grounds and things, my heart sinks because they’re putting the majority of the money into how it looks, not how it works,’ Lynne explains. ‘One home is run by a national charity and it’s charging £3,000 a week and the care is bog standard . . . if I want to be generous.’
The practice of kicking people out when they run out of money is surprisingly widespread. Self-funders, having sold their homes, fund their place until their assets drop below £23,000 and they become eligible for state support. At this point, they are evicted. These evictions were happening so often, causing distress to old and infirm people and landing them on the doorstep of the local authority, that one county employed a social worker specifically to work with self-funders and their families to advise on how to avoid it.
Private equity
Across the care sector another shadowy presence looms: private equity firms, which are moving into the sector and now own a large proportion of homes. In 2011, the Guardian reported that 135,000 people were being cared for by private equity-backed operators. New players on the block include Terra Firma, which took over 500 Four Seasons care homes earlier in the year. Another entrant into social care is Acromas, which through its acquisition of Allied Healthcare has become a lead player in the home care sector, along with Sovereign Capital.
Private equity firms are not accountable to the public. Known as predators due to their profit-maximising and asset-stripping, they have little interest in the markets in which they operate – which is particularly worrying in social care. They run on huge debts used to finance takeovers (Acromas has recorded debts of £6.6 billion) and are known for tax avoidance through offshore accounts. As many residents are receiving local authority support, tax money is once again being funnelled towards private interests.
Given the importance of social care, shouldn’t there be government regulation of such companies’ finances to ensure there is no repeat of the Southern Cross collapse, which affected 31,000 residents? It’s not on the cards, and the reason is ideological. As Egan puts it, ‘They refuse to entertain the idea because it doesn’t fit in with their world view of the private market and the role of the state.’ Tellingly, managing partner of Sovereign Capital Ryan Robson is a big-time Tory donor (giving over £250,000) and put himself up for selection as the Conservative election candidate in Bracknell.
Overall the picture is bleak – but workforce organising, community opposition and a national Right to Care Campaign backed by numerous organisations are trying to stop the issue from being pushed into the long grass. There are ample examples of quality care in the sector. But it shows the dangers of privatising a crucial aspect of the welfare state, and serves as an example of why it must be resisted.
* Names have been changed

Able to fight: How disabled people are taking on the Tories

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:52:03 +0000

Disabled people stopped London traffic by chaining their wheelchairs together earlier this year. Photo: Pete Riches
‘We feel that these are violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We haven’t striven for 70 years to have all these rights taken away from us in one parliament.’ John McArdle, co-founder of the Scotland-based Black Triangle Campaign, doesn’t mince his words when he talks about the need to fight the government’s cuts agenda.
All the activists interviewed for this piece shared the same anger and passion. As far as anti-austerity activism goes, the disability movement has remained mobilised, vocal and determined when other sectors of the population appear tet to have fully awakened, or in the case of students, have lost momentum after initial dramatic revolts. As John McDonnell MP warned the House of Commons in June, ‘We now have a disability movement in this country of which we have not seen the equal before … These people are not going to go away.’
That movement has been building for some time. ‘Miss Dennis Queen’ is a blogger and longtime disability rights activist with the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN), who’s been involved in campaigning for more than 12 years. She acknowledges the recent ‘explosion’ of campaigning but emphasises the coalition’s policies aren’t entirely new – and neither is resistance. Labour had devised cuts that were taken on and set in stone by the current government: ‘We were talking about this before but protests at that time weren’t being reported.’
Likewise the most high profile campaigns, such as DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts), already existed within the disability rights movement, which had been working for years to further equality, inclusion and recognition for the disabled population. The cuts put years of hard-won progress into reverse gear with such velocity that suffering was filtering from boardrooms to bedrooms with brutal speed. By the time the protest movement surged with students and other anti-cuts groups, thousands of disabled people were ready for a call to arms.
Bold action
The blockade of Oxford Circus with wheelchairs tied together with chain on 28 January demonstrated the readiness for civil disobedience – along with the ability to grab headlines. Andy Greene, a member of DPAC’s national steering committee, explains that the action came about as the welfare reform bill was going through parliament and was high on the agenda of both DPAC and their partners-in-protest UK Uncut. He says: ‘It kick-started consciousness more than anything … It showed we had the power within the movement to reignite the militant actions that hadn’t been seen since the late eighties and early nineties.’
Miss Dennis Queen thinks there’s an inherent power in taking direct action as a disabled person. For observers, she says, ‘being aware of us doing it contradicts the prejudice around us. It’s so opposite to what is expected of us that it educates everyone.’ And the sight of wheelchairs outnumbered by police, she adds, further proves their points.
Bold and creative actions and demonstrations have become a hallmark of the campaigns. Further London roadblocks – in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament – and occupations such as that of the Glasgow Atos office all involve the physical taking of space. They assert disabled people’s existence in a policy climate that seems bent on erasure, while the blocking of traffic symbolises the blocking of bills. In occupying the head office of Deloitte in Scotland, Black Triangle was showing the movement’s alternative narrative, a critique of neoliberalism, finance and tax-dodging in particular, to that put forth by the government. The accountancy firm was targeted because of the Deloitte chairman – and ‘tax-dodging guru’ – David Cruickshank’s cosy relationship with David Hartnett at HM Revenue and Customs.
John McArdle is critical of recent media resistance to reporting on demonstrations such as these. He cites the Trafalgar Square action in April: ‘The BBC reported there were traffic problems in their bulletins but there was a blackout basically. Definitely there seems to be a conscious decision not to report on acts of civil disobedience.’
The failure to cover events is not a surprise, though. While Westminster is, in McArdle’s words, ‘coming up with sheer lies and propaganda’ to garner public support for the cuts, the media seem only too happy to act as their cheerleaders. A frequently-cited example is the claim that there are huge levels of fraud in disability living allowance claims. The actual figure, according to the Department of Work and Pensions’ own report, Fraud and Error in the Benefit System, published in February, is 0.5 per cent.
Hate campaign
The government-led misinformation around these figures has underpinned what amounts to a hate campaign from the tabloid press towards disability benefit claimants. This was epitomised by the Sun’s vitriolic editorial against ‘scroungers’ in which it claimed: ‘They cannot be bothered to find a job or they claim to be sick when they are perfectly capable of work because they prefer to sit at home watching widescreen TVs – paid for by YOU.’
At the same time, police figures show the rate of disability hate crime has soared. A total of 1,942 disability hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2011, up by 14 per cent on 2010 and doubling since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. According to Andy Greene, ‘Everyday on the DPAC website we’re hearing of people being accosted in the street, in their own homes, on public transport.’
In response, disability rights groups and activists have been flooding the internet with their own stories. Blogs – sarcastically named with the labels they aim to repudiate, such as ‘Benefit Scrounging Scum’ and ‘Diary of a Benefit Scrounger’ – have gained huge support, featuring honest accounts of negotiating the benefits system and daily life with a disability or ill health. The Black Triangle campaign website was the eighth top political blog in the ebuzzing rankings in June, while Diary of a Benefit Scrounger was ranked 15th in July.
Miss Dennis Queen comments: ‘People talk about “armchair activists”, the label used to mean people sitting in their house with opinions not necessarily taking action. But in 12–13 years of being an activist I have done most of my work from my bed.’ From resource sharing to petitions, mythbusting and networking, the internet is not just a tool but a realm for protest within the movement, and an ultimately inclusive one: those who can’t get on the streets can act from home.
This is just one example of the movement’s stated aim to use every mean at its disposal to fight back. Equally important are the links made between different campaigns, trade unions and the medical profession. Disability campaigns have reached out to trade unions to work on common goals such as protecting public services and the rights of disabled people in the workplace. One example is the Hardest Hit coalition, particularly active in the north east, where trade unions, campaigners and charities have come together to organise conferences, rallies, protests and written reports about the effects of government policy.
Support from within the medical establishment, particularly with regard to work capability assessments, is also gaining momentum. In May, GPs at the BMA’s local medical committees conference in Liverpool called for the test to be scrapped as it was harming patients. Others have been publicly questioning whether the tests are in violation of medical ethics. At the BMA’s annual conference in June, the doctors’ union passed a motion demanding that work capability assessments be ended ‘with immediate effect and be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause unavoidable harm to some of the weakest and vulnerable in society’.
Even as the coalition tries to keep bulldozing its policies through, and local authorities keep burying their heads in the sand about the impact of their cuts, the disability movement is showing they won’t get away without a fight.

Atos and the Paralympics: rubbing salt in the wounds

Atos Healthcare’s contract to assess the ‘fitness for work’ of incapacity benefit, ESA and DLA claimants is worth £100 million per year. The company’s boss Thierry Breton was awarded a £1 million bonus this year on top of his annual pay packet of nearly £1 million. The multi-million pound IT company is one of the big winners from the government’s welfare reform programme and its privatisation agenda.
The assessments carried out by the company have become a lynchpin of the coalition’s welfare reforms. They have been criticised by doctors as ‘dominating the whole procedure’ for assigning benefit categories – despite lacking medical expertise and working, it is claimed, to targets rather than seeking an accurate reflection of need. Staff have reportedly used Facebook to refer to claimants as ‘parasitic wankers’ and ‘down and outs’.
Most controversy surrounding the assessments has been around the criteria used and the impact the stress of them has on people’s health. It’s not difficult to see why they have been widely lambasted as fundamentally flawed: Citizens Advice Scotland found that among the claimants deemed fit for work were people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, heart failure, strokes, severe depression and terminal cancer. The tests, based on drop-down box choices on a computer program, are said to be inadequate for complex conditions.
The government has boasted that half of all new ESA claimants are found fit for work. However, between 40-70 per cent of the decisions are being appealed, and so far 40 per cent of appeals have won – costing millions in taxpayer money on top of the distress and financial hardship of wrong assessments. The Daily Mirror recently reported that 32 people a week died last year after being deemed to be well enough to go out and get a job.
The human impact is becoming clearer. Coroners’ reports on suicides have noted the stress of the assessment and appeals process as a contributory factor, while citizens’ advice and welfare advice services are inundated with people seeking help on appealing benefit decisions. Not surprisingly, Atos has become one of the top targets for protesters. People are also using the web to share Atos horror stories, which continue to emerge thick and fast.
Atos’s sponsorship of the Paralympics this year has enraged campaigners as ‘rubbing salt into the wounds’. Demonstrations, including candlelit vigils for Atos victims, are planned in protest.

What the government is doing to disabled people

There are more than 10 million disabled people in the UK, who have been hit from various directions by coalition government policy – particularly through benefit reforms and local authority cuts. Taken together, warns Nick Coyle of Disability Alliance, ‘the combined effect will mean some people are cut adrift from the entire welfare state’.
Overall, the government has planned cuts of £2.17 billion (20 per cent) to disability living allowance (DLA), along with £2 billion of cuts to employment and support allowance (ESA). DLA can be claimed by those in or out of work to cover the extra costs of living with a disability; it is split into mobility and care components. ESA is for those out of work and can be claimed either by people in the ‘support’ group, who face the biggest barriers to working, or those in the ‘work-related activity’ group, who are expected to get back into work in the future.
ESA has been limited to one year for the latter group, while claimants must undergo ‘fitness for work’ assessments by the private firm Atos – these have been one of the most controversial, and damaging, aspects of the government’s reforms (see RP Feb/Mar 2011). Many are pushed off ESA and onto jobseekers’ allowance, ignoring the fact that the major barriers to work for disabled people remain transport and the workplace itself rather than lack of will. Activist John McArdle says this amounts to disability ‘being systematically denied in order to deprive us of the social security to which we’re entitled in a civilised society’.
Next year, the DLA will be scrapped in favour of a new benefit, the personal independence payment (PIP). In the process it is predicted that half a million people will lose their entitlement. The government has declared in advance that the switch will result in a 20 per cent cut to the benefit bill – leading campaigners to argue that this is proof that the cost reductions are determining how the eligibility criteria will be set, rather than reflecting people’s needs. Because the government claims it is focusing support on people ‘who need it most’, disability groups fear those with lesser needs could lose benefits, hitting their independence, wellbeing and quality of life. The phasing out of the independent living fund – a benefit that was specifically aimed at those with the greatest support needs – also contradicts the government rhetoric.
Local authority cuts to the adult social care budget have reached nearly £900 million this year, on top of the £1 billion cut last year, according to the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. Councils are raising eligibility criteria for social care, in many cases restricting it to those with ‘critical’ or ‘substantial’ needs, increasing its cost and closing down services. Reductions in care packages have in several cases led individuals to take councils to court; legal aid cuts will make this recourse increasingly difficult in the future. Disabled services such as day centres have already lost significant funding. One in three local authorities have closed day services, while the costs of attending centres, including transport, have risen on average by 70 per cent. Mencap’s recent ‘Stuck at Home’ report found that one in four people with a learning disability now spend less than one hour outside their home every day.
True to style, the government has been willfully blind to damning evidence about its programme’s impacts on disabled people’s poverty, quality of life and mental health. In May, calls were dismissed for an assessment of the cumulative effect of the policy changes on the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The minister for disabled people, Maria Miller, claimed the exercise, called for by a joint committee on human rights, disabled people and their organisations, would be too ‘complex’.

The impact on women

The paid-work-or-nothing attitude foisted on many disabled people, together with an increasing reliance on informal carers, is having a particular impact on women. Claire Glasman from WinVisible, a grassroots group for women with visible and invisible disabilities, explains:
‘With other groups we’ve opposed the phasing out of income support, which recognises that mothers and other carers are already working unwaged and should not be harassed into a waged job.
As disabled people and disabled women we feel that coping with a disability, and all the discrimination that you face, is an unwaged workload. This deserves to be recognised and to be cut down by adaptations, because in an inaccessible world everything is an enormous effort to do. As women we are also the ones very likely to be looking after children, the ones with time to be visiting elderly relatives in hospital, and so on.
In this culture of working really long hours, there’s less and less time for relationships and caring for people. As disabled women we’re often doing that kind of unwaged work and we want it recognised, and to be able to get money to live on, without having work conditions imposed on us.’

Nothing to do, nowhere to go – how cuts hit kids

admin — Sat, 26 May 2012 16:42:36 +0000

School will soon be out – but for many children and young people the holidays have a lot less in store, and for many parents a period of anxiety is looming. Last year, hundreds of thousands of young people were affected by the dramatic cuts in youth services, which bit as the summer holidays were approaching. The closures of childcare services and youth centres were the most visible examples, with the latter receiving particular attention in the aftermath of the August riots. The Guardian video of a Haringey teenager lamenting youth club closures and warning ‘There’ll be riots’ seemed eerily prophetic. One year on, the sector is still in turmoil. How are services adapting to cuts and what are the most serious effects?
Jo, an early years worker from inner London*, is eager to explain the severe impact of playscheme closures in the area. Pointing out that children from poorer families often live in cramped housing and have much fewer opportunities for play, she says: ‘Without playschemes and other activities over the holidays, inner city children miss out on a lot of important experiences – trips to the seaside, creative and messy play, interacting with their peers in a less formal environment, running, jumping, dancing.’ She points to the key role of playschemes in emotional well-being and in identifying special educational needs before formal schooling starts, as well as the links made between a lack of play opportunities and a rise in ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)-type difficulties.
With the government’s austerity budgeting, the universal childcare to which parents are entitled – and which is so important to low-income families – is being dismantled. A report from the Daycare Trust last year showed 62 per cent of local authorities had been forced to cut childcare and playscheme funding, and 50 per cent were offering a decreased level of childcare provision. There has also been a sharp reduction in the number of places, which means three and four year olds who are entitled to 15 hours a week of free early learning education may not find a nursery, centre or playscheme to deliver it.
The situation is likely to get worse in the next few years as the bulk of the cuts are yet to come. The ‘big society’, rather than stepping in to fill the gap, is proving instead to be equally vulnerable to funding crises. As Jo explains, ‘There isn’t money in the voluntary sector to fill the gap – there’s less grants and trust money to apply for and greater competition.’
The tough financial choices facing parents have hit disadvantaged families harder too. The average cost of a week’s childcare increased to £96.85 in England last year, up from £58.45 ten years before. Some areas have seen a 50 per cent hike in just one year. For poor families, says Jo, turning to private childcare ‘just isn’t an option in the first place . . . Parents are forced to stay at home to look after their child with all of the complications, headaches and vilification that comes with claiming benefits.’ The result? ‘Probably a widening in the achievement gap between children from different economic backgrounds. We’re likely to see an increase in children deemed to be living in poverty, children growing up in the city with increasingly challenging home lives as families are hit from various directions.’
For workers, the cuts mean increasingly precarious employment. Often employed on casual contracts and paid hourly, early years workers, the vast majority of whom are female, are feeling the pitfalls of casual employment – no sick pay, job insecurity – much more keenly. Against this background, organising in opposition becomes problematic, although small‑scale resistance is happening, with staff refusing the demand to do ‘more for less’ as employers try to avoid paying staff for all the time they put in.
Youth centre closures
The closure of youth centres has received more attention, particularly when union resistance spearheaded by Unite took place last year. In Oxfordshire, where the Conservative local authority’s cuts were some of the most dramatic in the country, youth workers went on strike and protested outside David Cameron’s constituency offices in Witney. The campaign eventually lost momentum, however. ‘They basically ignored us. People felt drained and exhausted after the whole affair,’ says the Unite community and youth workers chair David Ricketts.
Countrywide, 3,000 youth service workers have lost their jobs so far and, in the ‘commissioning’ atmosphere whereby grants are attached to performance targets, universal services such as youth centres have come off worse from spending cuts. Last year 20 per cent of centres closed their doors, and although some have tentatively reopened with volunteers, rafts of others have since had to close too – the most recent being in West Sussex and Somerset. Many local authorities are now targeting their reduced funds at early intervention ‘hubs’, designed to provide support for young people facing problems with crime, truancy, pregnancy or drugs. In this mindset youth clubs as a community resource, a place where young people can gain confidence, experience citizenship and explore non-academic talents, are deemed unnecessary.
This has the most impact on teenagers who could get into trouble, even if they’re not already. According to Bill, an experienced youth worker in the south east*, the non-structured environment of a youth club is especially important for those for whom structured and organised activities don’t appeal, even where they are available. ‘It’s precisely their informality that harder-to-reach young people respond to, and that’s why open youth centres are so often frequented by those people. Youth centres offer a space for a group to operate out of, long-term community relationships, a social network and continuity. If the local youth centre closes, where can a teenager in care hang out with their friends? It’s not the same for the middle classes.’ They are the polar opposite of the flagship Conservative youth policy of national citizen service for 16 year olds, entering its second year this summer, which David Cameron enticingly described as ‘non-military national service’.
The community-wide effect of losing these facilities is as hard to measure as their benefits, but experts have hit the headlines by warning of an increase in gang-related crime and serious impacts on the safety of young people in urban areas. In many isolated rural areas, teenagers are simply left with nothing to do.
Volunteers and charities
So why can’t volunteers and charities step in to protect services? After all, youth work started in the charity sector. In the most part, according to Bill, independent youth centres are only viable with local authority support: ‘You could run something without local authority funding but it would be too expensive for many young people.’ Another factor is who would deliver the services. ‘Some areas have a strong voluntary sector who could do it, others don’t … In some cases, there isn’t money locally to afford it, and if you put nothing in new projects can’t get off the ground.’
This doesn’t mean that people are not demonstrating plenty of passion and creativity to try to enable the sector to weather the storm. A good example of this can be found in Buckinghamshire, where the council pulled funding from 27 youth centres and around 100 youth workers were made redundant. Some of the centres have since reopened with a volunteer workforce. Working with them is a new social enterprise, which aims to reinvigorate clubs with activities as well as a committed group of managers.
Rafe’s Place is named after Rafe Chiles, who died in 2004 aged just 23 but was a huge inspiration in the area for his work organising music nights and other events for young people. It has found a niche that involves local students at Buckinghamshire New University who want work experience managing and running youth activities at clubs in a partnership that focuses on ‘two problems [becoming] resources for each other’. Once it becomes established, the group hopes the model can be replicated in other areas. One of its directors, Georgia Romeril, describes the need to engage young people in her local area of Amersham: ‘They need something they’re interested in and that inspires them. When the youth clubs closed they literally had nowhere to go, and young people get so much stick around here.’
The idea was conceived more than two years ago, before the cuts began to bite, with the aim of running projects that really appeal to teenagers, including street art, DJ lessons, music production and a summer community festival. Since the funding for youth centres was slashed, their work has taken on a new importance, with clubs approaching them to help run activities they can no longer afford.
While Rafe’s Place is an example of a new approach going from strength to strength, mainly thanks to the relentless commitment of the team, it is designed as a parallel project to youth centres and is not involved in running them itself. The inherent problems of expecting a professional and funded service to be run by volunteers and charities remain. Youth clubs in the county are appealing for more volunteers. Georgia Romeril is well aware of the shortfall as her day job involves volunteer recruitment in the charity sector. ‘You can’t necessarily just run on volunteers because people are struggling themselves and just don’t have the time in their day. Everyday volunteers are hard to come by and hard to keep.’
The same sentiment was expressed strongly in Norfolk after a BBC article on the ‘big society’ and youth clubs ended on a cautiously positive note, suggesting that although precarious, youth clubs in the area were being kept going by the passion and commitment of local people. A youth worker featured in the article, who had set up a charity to continue services after being made redundant, responded indignantly. She stated that ‘funding was hard to come by’ and that ‘qualified youth workers are essential to youth centres due to the specific issues young people face and volunteers are not trained to deal with these’. In seeking training for volunteers, she said they had received ‘no support’.
Worse to come
If funding is hard to come by now, it’s going to get worse over the next few years. The National Children’s Bureau warns that children’s and young people’s charities in England face funding cuts over the next five years that will exceed those faced by the voluntary sector as a whole. By 2016, funding is expected to be £400 million down on 2011 levels.
Resistance to the closures of both early years services such as nurseries and youth centres has continued with local campaigns to save certain projects, such as Heatham House in Richmond and Roundabout Nursery in Hackney. One youth worker suggested that whether organising against closures had any effect or not depended on the local authority – while the scattered re-opening of some clubs shows councils being prepared to be responsive, others stick resolutely to their slash-and-burn agendas.
Overall, the attack on youth centres has left patchy provision around the country. And like so many of the public sector cuts, it is economically disadvantaged young people who are most likely to feel the effects.
*Some names have been changed.
Illustration by Cressida Knapp.

Jordan Valley: To exist is to resist

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:42:02 +0000

The Jordan Valley, which makes up two thirds of the occupied West Bank, is the forgotten land in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The struggles of the Palestinians who live here receive little attention, and it often escapes the notice of international solidarity groups and NGOs.
There is total Israeli control over 95 per cent of the valley, designated ‘Area C’ under the Oslo Accords. Many of the 56,000 inhabitants now live in the other 5 per cent – just five small villages and Jericho. The area had a population of 360,000 before 1967, but with the war came the mass expulsion of people from the land they had farmed for generations. This was then turned over to ‘natural reserves’ (often used as a convenient label for areas Israel seeks to control), military bases and settlements.
The expansion of the settlements continues at a rapid pace – they now cover half of the valley. The contrast of the settlements’ lush greenery with the more barren, desert-like landscape of the Palestinian land shows the occupation at its starkest.
Israel’s determination to capture the valley rests on its huge strategic importance. The area also has vast arable lands and important water reserves (estimated at almost half of total water resources in the West Bank). It would be the only place a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem could expand.
The population remaining in Area C now mainly comprises farmers and Bedouin communities. Daily life under occupation is hard, characterised by repression in the form of home demolitions (in many cases over and over again), destruction of personal property and farming equipment, harassment, violence and the stifling effects of military checkpoints. Denied the necessary permits to build, infrastructure and water pipes are regularly destroyed. In light of all this, one can understand the motto of the valley’s population: to exist is to resist.
Helping people to do this is the Jordan Valley Solidarity campaign. Rashid, a Palestinian in his late twenties who works with the group, describes its work as ‘popular and peaceful resistance – the struggle to stay on the land is the main resistance’.
The campaign is the only grass-roots Palestinian movement in the valley. Based in the Friends Meeting House in the village of Al Jiftlik, it takes its lead from the valley’s communities, mobilising to support those facing repression and documenting abuses by the army and settlers. Ongoing building projects with mud bricks aim to create long-term Palestinian ‘facts on the ground’, including homes, schools and water pipes – even if building contravenes occupation policy. Hundreds of Palestinians from the Jordan Valley are involved in the JVS campaign in various capacities, such as building and teaching, and the loose network of solidarity extends throughout the area.
Despite the relentless Israeli attempts to eradicate Palestinian life from the area, there have been successes. One is the village of Upper Fasayil, which has flourished since the building of a school six years ago. Homes have been built where before people lived in tents, and they have water and electricity.
The work of the Palestinians is supported by people from around the world, who help with the campaign activities and spread the voice of the people in the valley through global links. ‘The most important thing is that people go there, see the situation and then come back home and talk about it because they’ve seen it with their own eyes,’ says Rashid.
Rosa, an activist from Brighton, spent six months last year working in Palestine with the campaign and agreed that being a witness is an important role. ‘People on the ground know people are watching and supporting them. That’s one of the biggest things, that the people there do not feel forgotten.’
The campaign is seen as an evolving network. After initially twinning with a group in Brighton in 2006, there are now also groups in France, Spain, Italy and Japan. Unlike the top-down approach of many NGOs and aid organisations, the emphasis is on listening to what the Palestinian communities want and need, and working in the vein of friendship and solidarity between communities. Rashid asserts that this is the way of the future, the ‘right way’.
While the occupation strengthens its grip on the land, the resolve of Palestinians to support each other, along with growing global civil society links, offer the best chance that the Jordan Valley will not be forgotten.
www.jordanvalleysolidarity.org

Shack fightback: Bandile Mdlalose on Abahlali baseMjondolo

admin — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:49:52 +0000

Bandile Mdlalose. Photo: World Development Movement
Bandile Mdlalose is the general secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers’ movement, in South Africa. Politically active ‘since she was born’, Bandile, now 24, became involved in Abahlali in 2008 before becoming secretary in 2010. She describes the organisation’s role as ‘to fight, protect, promote and advance the dignity of the poor in South Africa’.
Abahlali is a grass-roots organisation, which protests about the lack of housing for poor people through a variety of means. These range from mobilising quickly to stop shack evictions to taking the government to court – and winning – on its plans to demolish shack settlements and push residents into ‘transit camps’, supposedly in aid of the UN’s millennium development goal of developing all informal settlements by 2014. Abahlali works with the Landless People’s Movement, the Rural Network and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign in the Poor People’s Alliance, a network of radical poor people’s movements.
When did Abahlali baseMjondolo start and what prompted it?
It started in 2005 in a settlement called Kennedy Road. The people in the Kennedy Road shack settlement have been promised things so many times – that they will build houses, service delivery for the community – and eventually they felt enough was enough. The community mobilised themselves and decided to protest. A number of people were arrested.
They were asked ‘What organisation are you from?’ The community decided to organise itself and create a name – Abahlali baseMjondolo, which is the Zulu word for ‘shack residents’. After that other shack dweller communities decided to join in. Now we have become very big.
What is it like to live in one of the shack settlements?
We are used to it – but it’s never nice. We don’t have an alternative – we are forced to live in it. Sometimes when it rains the water flows inside. When it’s hot we are unable to breathe because of the small windows. We have no water or electricity, just an empty shelter. We light candles for light and to light the stoves but if there’s a lot of wind we always fear because it could burn down any time. A lot of people have died in shack fires but there’s nothing we can do, and the government always shifts the blame back to the people.
What are the main goals of the movement?
Our main goal is land and housing. We believe land is a gift from God, so it should be shared equally – it does not need to be privatised. Within that, there are little things we are achieving. We have managed to create our own space, having our own movement and speaking for ourselves, acting for ourselves, without someone speaking for us. We are managing to protest by trying to implement the constitution that the government has documented but not implemented.
How do you organise?
Firstly, we are a membership-based organisation. It’s a different approach to other organisations. We believe that we must work with communities, we must educate them on their rights, we must let them do things for themselves, rather than having someone else doing things for them. We also work with young people.
We have a one-year calendar that keeps our organisation sustainable and active. On 27 April, South Africa has Freedom Day. We say ‘We are still not free, we still live in the slums’, so we always have ‘Unfreedom Day’. Even on Human Rights Day we always have a protest because we don’t have any human rights. Rather than celebrating human rights, we are questioning, or we are sending memorandums. We have meetings every month but we emphasise that communities should have their own meetings. The struggles are in the communities, not in our head office.
Do you see Abahlali as continuing in the tradition of the anti-apartheid struggle?
It’s nothing new, we’re just starting off where Steve Biko has left, where all those comrades have left: Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King. The apartheid system is still there. The only change is from a white government to a black government. The only thing I could say has changed is the constitution. If you say to people ‘Apartheid is still there’, they will say ‘You can organise for yourselves, you can speak for yourself, we can walk with a white person’, but is that enough? Is that really what other comrades died for? Is that what Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for?
Mandela once wrote that it’s a long way to freedom. I still hear that there is freedom but I’ve not seen the light of freedom. That’s why we always hold the government against their own constitution because, yes, it’s a beautiful constitution and it accommodates everyone, but the constitution can’t work for itself – it needs someone to make sure it works.

‘The government may have trampled over democracy but people will still be squatting’

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:15:48 +0000

A last-minute change to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill in November criminalised squatting in residential buildings. The government announced the additional clause just six days before the vote, making serious campaigning against criminalisation impossible. But the government’s haste may yet prove its downfall. Parliament has produced an unclear piece of law that may not stand up to legal scrutiny.
Paul Reynolds, a SQUASH (Squatters Action for Secure Homes) activist, describes the legislation as ‘the criminalisation of the homeless in a housing crisis’. There are currently 700,000 empty properties in the UK, and 600,000 people facing homelessness, which increased by 17 per cent last year. According to Crisis, 40 per cent of homeless people have slept in disused buildings to avoid sleeping rough. The new legislation will criminalise people who are already vulnerable.
SQUASH was resurrected in May this year, having started when previous attempts to criminalise squatting were tabled in the 1990s. The campaign involves a broad coalition of groups, including Crisis, the Empty Homes Agency, lawyers, activists and squatters themselves. It focused its efforts on getting people to take part in the government’s consultation. Their success was phenomenal: 96 per cent of respondents expressed concern about criminalisation, including the police, magistrates and even one landlords’ association. Just 25 members of the public responded to say they were concerned about squatting, compared with 2,126 who expressed concern about the harm caused by criminalisation.
The Ministry of Justice declared that although ‘the statistical weight of responses was against taking action on squatting’, it had taken a ‘qualitative rather than a quantitative’ approach as so many responses (90 per cent) were received in support of SQUASH’s campaign. Yet even if these are discounted, five out of six individual respondents were still against criminalisation. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ commented SQUASH campaigner Joseph Blake. ‘They’re completely ignoring the results of their own consultation.’
Headlines in some newspapers have suggested that squatters pose a significant threat to home owners. Yet it is almost unheard of for an occupied house to be squatted, and existing legislation already enables ‘displaced residential occupiers’ or ‘intended occupiers’ to immediately evict squatters with police help.
What the new law does is call legitimate protest tactics into question. The ambiguous definition of the term ‘occupier’ could criminalise many forms of dissent. If the tweets of housing minister Grant Shapps are anything to go by, this is exactly what the new legislation will be used for. On the day of the vote he tweeted this threat: ‘St Paul’s: Right to protest NOT a right to squat. Looking at law to see if change needed to deal w/ camps like St Paul’s & Dale Farm faster.’
There are plenty of reasons why the government might have thought it useful to rush through this legislation, and criminalising the current wave of civil and student occupations seems a likely one.
SQUASH activists have already seen their right to protest denied. On the night before the vote an organised ‘mass sleep out’ in Parliament Square, to highlight the number of people who may be forced onto the streets, resulted in 17 arrests. The police claimed the protest was unauthorised because SQUASH hadn’t given seven days’ notice: an impossibility as there were only six days between the clause being announced and voted through.
An emergency amendment was written by Crisis and tabled by John McDonnell MP. This proposed that criminalisation should not apply to residential buildings left empty for over six months, and that the particularly vulnerable – such as care leavers and those registered as homeless or at risk – should be exempt. The amendment failed and with Labour abstaining, the bill was easily passed.
The rush to legislate leaves various issues unanswered and potential loopholes for the future. It criminalises squatting only in residential rather than commercial properties and it is unclear what this distinction actually means. Does it, for example, include any building with residential planning permission? It will be up to the Lords to make sense of this confusion before it passes into law, and SQUASH will be lobbying peers to rip up the legislation and start again.
SQUASH’s Paul Reynolds is convinced that the legislation will prove legally unsound when scrutinised in detail. And whatever the outcome, he says, it won’t end squatting. ‘The government may have trampled over democracy but people will still be squatting,’ he comments. ‘They’ll just be more organised now.’
www.squashcampaign.org

Soaked in blood

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:08:37 +0000

Socialist historian and novelist John Tully’s well-researched history of rubber shines a spotlight on a material most of us take for granted. The result is an accessible, well-written and absorbing account of rubber’s blood-soaked history, from the plunder of the Amazon and the Congo basin to slave labour in Nazi work camps. At first glance, a 360-page book on a single commodity might put off a potential reader. However it soon becomes clear why rubber is such a worthy subject. An essential commodity in the development of industrial capitalism, the drive to acquire rubber was central to European imperialism – with its catastrophic effects for indigenous populations.
Later, rubber manufacture in ‘rubber’s home town’, the US city of Akron, became a site of workers’ struggles. Rubber giants such as Goodyear and Firestone were some of the world’s first transnational corporations.
The book is brought to life by Tully’s humanist approach. By drawing on primary sources such as the poems and songs of the ‘coolies’ who tapped rubber on plantations in Indochina he makes vivid the violent reality of such colonial regimes. He achieves the same personalisation of the perpetrators: from the quiet scientist who oversaw the death camps at Monowitz, to the British upper-class plantation assistants whose days mixed brutality, boredom and alcoholism in the heat of the jungle. The chapters on workers’ attempts to unionise in Akron have a more typical academic tone and it’s only here that, although still interesting, parts become slightly bogged down in acronyms.
Needless to say, this book is not an uplifting read. The tales of the inspirational campaigners who had the forward thinking to challenge racism and colonialism – such as Roger Casement, who documented British atrocities inflicted on Indian rubber workers in the Congo – provide the only brief interludes of hope
in a story characterised by shocking cruelty.
The whole book serves to corroborate Tully’s assertion in the epilogue that: ‘There is no room for morality or social responsibility in the corporate boardrooms.’ This statement on the inhumanity of such capitalist accumulation, and the prioritisation of resources over human life, is a powerful point still relevant today.