IWCA mayor candidate interviewed

Submitted by Anon on 17 June, 2004 - 5:34

Lorna Reid of the Independent Working Class Association is standing for London
Mayor on 10 June. The IWCA has one sitting councillor in Oxford, and has conducted
a number of very local campaigns in other areas, mostly in London. Solidarity
cannot agree with much of the IWCA's localist approach and their exclusive
stress on community issues. We have very a different, we think broader,
vision of independent working class politics. Cathy Nugent
interviewed Lorna, who is based in Islington.
What do you hope to achieve by standing in the Mayoral election?

Standing for Mayor may seem a bizarre thing to some, what is a working class
woman standing for Mayor? There'll be a lot of interest in that right off. But
this is mainly to give the IWCA a platform for the demands for working-class
people. None of the other candidates will be doing this.

Our political slogan and idea is 'We live here too'. By saying that, we are
breaking the etiquette of the election, which is that it should be confined
to the interests of the middle class and the better off. Our campaign will allow
people to look beyond the London of the dinner parties, the media and the dot-com
industry. If we achieve nothing more than that the other candidates have to
address what we are saying about working class interests, then it will have
been a success.

We have had a very good response on the estates we have canvassd. We tend to
pick out particular wards or one big estate in different parts of London. That
ties in with where we have active people. We had to go to every single London
borough to get signatures to stand, but we found it easy. Any estate we went
to we got interest in the idea of a candidate who was saying something different.

We want to follow up our work in this campaign, this is just the start of something.

We didn't stand for the Assembly because we are not about endorsing the London
Mayor or the Assembly, that is, something that is completely ineffective. Most
working class people in London don't even know it exists. Also in terms of resources
a mayoral campaign is what we could manage.

We may very well stand in more council elections in London, if the time is
right and if the support is there in the local community. We want to be serious
candidates, people who are active locally on a long-term basis, and use the
elections to build working class activity.

Most of your demands on housing are focused on council housing. Why
is this?

Because what has happened to council housing is scandalous. The political issues
surrounding council housing make it important. Council housing has been sold
off and not been replaced. Social housing is now regarded as a legitimate target
for making a profit. But we don't say 'unless you live in a council house, we
don't want to know'.

The definition they use in relation to social housing now is affordable
housing
. But rents of £100 and upwards a week are not affordable
to the average working-class family! Housing Association flats can be a lot
higher than that.

ALMOs are no doubt, the first step to privatisation. (ALMO is short for Arm's
Length Management Organisation; an ALMO manages council homes and operates as
a private company). We have been told there will be no difference under ALMO.
So why bother?

Remember two thirds of the money that comes with an ALMO is coming as a loan.
And that money doesn't even begin to address the years of neglect of council
homes. Why bother unless you were trying to get ready the properties to sell
off, primarily to Housing Associations. Circle 33 hold a prominent position
on the Islington ALMO. Why do they do that unless they had their eye on some
housing stock?

We will have to have a sucessful national campaign over this because council
housing is going to get sold off, wholesale, at rock-bottom prices to Housing
Associations and private companies. There will be increased rents and less secure
tenants' rights.

The victories that council tenants have gained around the security of their
tenancies are worth highlighting. For example, in King Square in Islington,
tenants voted against stock transfer. This was an important victory because
tenants were told it was either that, or nothing.

This is not an issue that is sexy for left in the way that, for example,
the poll tax was. Of course the poll tax hit people immediately and this is
different: the security of council housing will stay the same for the next few
years and will only gradually be eroded. Still with this issue you have to go
onto estates and get involved with people and that's not what a lot of the left
choses to do.

Can you concretise what you mean by Community Restorative Justice?

CRJ is about communities working together to tackle anti-social behaviour.
Anti-social behaviour is a major concern on working class estates and can have
a devastating effect. We are calling for greater resources for young people
and political support for communities.

Restorative Justice is when you bring to people the consequences of their actions.
On my estate, which is a fairly quiet estate, we get people hanging about on
the stairs, puffing away, spitting, peeing, preventing people from getting up
the stairs, abusing people, putting stuff through peoples' letter boxes because
they've asked them to move. When that goes on you have to make those responsible
face up to the people who they are harassing. It is about turning the tables.
It is about confronting the behaviour.

I know a lot of the kids where I live, I know some of them have had a harder
start than others. But you can only go so far in excusing the behaviour. Everyone
has to learn to take responsibility. Working-class people have as high a standard
as anyone else about the way they want to live. Sometimes the conditions we
live in are not acceptable and we have to confront that.

But it is difficult to speak for different estates. There is no blueprint for
this.

We do not support the government's anti-social order legislation, certainly
not in the absence of provision for young people.

The government's policy doesn't work. Partly they are just moving people on
from one place to another, one estate to another. And there isn't a lot of moving
along anyway, there is a lot of bluff and bluster. Even if you thought it was
designed with the best will in the world to disperse anti-social groups, it
is not happening.

There is a direct correlation between providing for, or not providing for young
people, and youngsters having nothing to do and hanging about. When there is
no way for them to express their energies and talents of course they are going
to kick around and get into trouble. But as long as it is only happening on
the estates it doesn't matter, it doesn't need to be addressed. If there were
gangs of youths marauding up and down Upper Street [Islington's main shopping
street] it would be tackled.

On my estate we have had a long policy of always holding back on sanctions.
When we were screaming for provisions we were given sanctions. We got police
arriving on mass, kids being thrown up against walls and vamoose they're off
again. The only provision we have got is that we have provided ourselves; we
have had to provide the activities and the outings.

The same problems are replicated right across London. But it is always containable
for the authorities because it is kept on the estates. My estate is quite
small but the population is still the size of an average Scottish village. And
there is nothing, no facilities at all.

Your asylum seeker policy appears to be most concerned about the rights
of the host community e.g. you say 'the most hard-pressed areas play
host to new arrivals'. Could you comment on that? And what do you say about
refugee rights?

Refugees have the right to decent housing and resources as much as anybody
else. But they're not getting them. The host community, which will
include settled refugees, many different people from many different backgrounds,
isn't getting them.

We want resources for refugees, people who have been granted asylum, people
who have lived here for many, many years and for people who have been born and
bred here. The big distortion of what we are calling for is that this is all
about refugees coming in. No, this is about everybody not having any resources.
Not to tackle it is to pretend it is not happening. It seems that to discuss
this somehow makes you racist or anti-asylum seeker.

More and more people are being squeezed into a smaller and smaller space. If
you are living in overcrowded conditions and have been waiting to be rehoused
and you see other families, newly arrived, getting housed, it causes resentment.
Rightly or wrongly it does. It's partly divide and rule from the authorities.
But still we can't skirt around the issue, and that is that there is a distinct
and definite lack of resources and those resources have to be replaced.

We are calling for more resources for those communities where asylum seekers
are arriving and not just asylum seekers but also people coming to look for
work. These are the same areas where resources have been taken out: housing
has been sold off, GPs can't stand the pressure and move out, hospitals are
handed over to legions of managers.

What do you think about the Respect campaign, building on the opposition
to war?

It's a middle class campaign. Respect's manifesto does not mention the working
class. You will not see those two words together anywhere. They talk about poor
people and how terrible things happen to poor people ? one can only deduce that
for them the working class are victims. But we are not. There is no resonance
there with working class communities in London.

I was on the demonstration against the war. By and large there were two things
that united people on that demonstration: their opposition to the war, which
was for a variety of reasons, and their class. It was a middle class demonstration.
A million people against an illegal declaration of war on another country, well,
if we couldn't do that, there's not much hope for this country. I don't see
it as a massive, dramatic break with the old ways. Of course every generation
has a radical element of young people, but it is about what you do with it.

It has been said that you downplay industrial class struggle? How do
you see that?

Trade unions will always have a role in defending terms and conditions. But
the reality in Britain is that big industry has been all but been demolished
and replaced with small production. We don't have the mining, steel, etc. industries,
the sectors that threw up the big trade unions.

It's not always about industrial struggle. When John Maclean was organising
in Scotland he cycled for miles to teach workers how to read. The big demonstrations
in Glasgow during the war arose from women refusing to pay increased rents.
The women had to march on the factories to get the men out.

Throughout history there has been a marriage between organised workers and
the community. But for the left it seems to be a prohibitive way of organising.
What's the problem with community struggles? Every trade unionist has to live
somewhere and by and large they live in working class communities. Why would
we want to separate the two?

After all there is now an absence of mass agitation by the workers movement
and the community at large. So chosing one over the other hardly makes sense.

The question is how do you get the working class from its current battered
position to making gains? Should the final victory come from workers organised
at the point of production, or from the streets of the estates? That is completely
irrelevant at this time.

Right now we have very few rights. What we do have is being taken away from
us. We have no working class political organisation. You have to start from
where you are. In a sense the scope for that is enormous, because we have nothing.
We could start anywhere and it would make a difference.

At the moment the IWCA sees the potential for starting to make gains in the
communities and that will necessarily involve trade unionists. But if the left
put its resources into anything, as opposed to itself and its own opportunist
gains, then there would be a possibility of moving forward.

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