Another day, another squat
As the housing crisis deepens, squatting is likely to increase, out of necessity more than as a political act. Since September last year, squatting a residential property in England and Wales is a criminal offence, potentially carrying a prison sentence. The new legislation was supported by the Labour Party. Alex Reich from Haringey Left Unity talks to a young squatter in London.
A squat in Bristol
“I don’t want to be a rock star”, says Nico as he skilfully works the neck of his Epiphone semi-acoustic, “but I’d like to go to college and become a music teacher”. For a good-looking, long-haired London musician in his early twenties, that’s an atypically modest statement. But then Nico comes from Portugal – and his life has been caught up in the turmoil that the economic crisis has inflicted on southern Europe in particular. Just as his metal band was getting offers to play festival slots back home, he decided that his finances would not permit him to stay another month. In London, so he was told, he could at least find jobs working in bars and music venues.
Initially things seemed to be working out better than expected: Nico found a “proper job with contract and all” and a room in London. He even managed to save up some £5000. But none of this was to last. When he visited his home town, Nico found that the crisis had left both his parents jobless and destitute. Instead of living off his savings as originally planned, he gave them the bulk of the money and headed back for London.
Nico’s situation is far from rosy now. For the past two years, he has been living off poorly paid cash-in-hand jobs and moving from one London squat to another. As I speak to him, we sit in the basement of his latest abode, an abandoned Methodist church in South London. Old Bibles, disused priestly robes and other religious relics gather dust among the rubble; among them, a sad looking black Jesus statue and a door sign prohibiting women from entering god’s house during their monthly period. I’m here with my band to shoot a music video on a shoestring budget.
Despite the morbidly romantic setting, squatting is not a lifestyle choice, but a question of necessity for Nico and his half dozen friends: indeed, their hyperactive Staffordshire bull terrier seems to be the only one positively enjoying the rough-and-ready ambience, as well as being a reliable guard to keep the rats out.
Nor does Nico think of this as a form of political protest. But he is outspoken about the political circumstances that have brought him here. There are few jobs, yet at the same time benefits are being cut across Europe. Landlords want no tenants that aren’t in steady employment and check if your income meets their ungenerously set thresholds. Last year, British squatting laws were tightened – occupying residential premises is now a criminal offence. Quite what is someone like Nico supposed to do? Something has got to give, we agree – and, according to Nico, “this society will collapse sooner rather than later”. What will replace it, however, he is not sure.
I’m a Marxist communist, and my vision on what I would like to see happen may be a bit clearer than Nico’s. Even so, we see eye to eye as we discuss the internal dynamics of squats. There are no small-scale communal utopias in the here and now. If people are brought to up to compete against each other, these attitudes tend to inform their social lives in almost any environment. Although Nico and his friends sit in the same boat, the general feel is that of everyone looking out for themselves.
Tensions abound under the roof of the derelict church. Nico tells me about the man who entered the building first and now more or less considers himself to be its owner. A paranoid drug dealer, he demands absolute quiet when sleeping off his high. His proprietarian stance extends to the religious relics scattered about in the church: they are his and may not be touched by anybody as he is planning to sell them. I am reminded of my own squatting experiences as a teenager: in almost every house, there would be some belligerent old punk arsehole wielding a baseball bat and riding roughshod over everybody else. I can’t remember why we never managed to simply kick such types out.
There existed also so-called ‘political squats’ where I lived, occupied by autonomists who regularly held lengthy meetings. From what I gathered, they were usually tearing each other apart over alleged privilege, sexism, or racism. As a teenager, I didn’t find this atmosphere particularly attractive and preferred to put up with sundry maniacs in ‘apolitical squats’ – though in hindsight, I do admire how the autonomists decided upon actions or ejected seriously anti-social elements by majority vote.
Now most ‘political squats’ in Europe are gone, and to my knowledge, they have not brought any fundamental change regarding the housing situation anywhere. It was different in post-war Britain, when Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain. At its peak, more than 45,000 people were involved in occupations, with some 1,500 taking over flats and hotels in Pimlico, Kensington and St. John’s Wood alone. Although most of the squats disappeared after a few years, local governments bowed to the pressure and granted serious concessions in housing.
Today, as the housing situation deteriorates, one can well imagine a squatting campaign taking off. But for such a campaign to bring any gains – and not just on an individual level – it would have to be well organised and linked to a broader political struggle. Now, as in 1946, a party is needed. By this, I don’t mean a docile, legalist formation modelled on the German Left Party, which bowed to market pressure and raised the rents once it entered local government in Berlin. I mean a party that acts as a battering ram for the interests of the working class.
Later that evening, as we pack up our instruments, Nico tells us that he and three fellow squatters have decided to move out – apparently, things came to a head with the drug dealer upstairs as we were filming. Has it got anything to do with us, I wonder? “Not directly”, Nico assures me, “but when he wanted to charge you money for using ‘his’ basement, it triggered an argument about lots of other things. He’s unbearable. We’re sick of him.” Nico politely refuses the beer I offer him – he needs a clear head now. The four of them know a derelict building nearby. Since entering it is now a criminal offence, they will have to be extremely inconspicuous.
I ask why they cannot simply kick out the drug dealer. “There are more of you”, I argue, “Why do you allow him to tyrannise you?” But Nico is tired of fighting, he says: “this guy will have trouble running the place on his own. Maybe it will teach him something.” Neither does Nico care about the abandoned religious relics, which I suggest they stuff their bags with. At this point, he just wants some peace and quiet – and something resembling a dignified existence.
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9 responses to “Another day, another squat”
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Sorry to post on this thread, but the moving ‘Dannys story’ article, an important and infrequently discussed issue here is not allowing comments, saying page not found.
Excellent article! Such young people really are caught in a terrible bind. Sonera political impetus is urgently needed.
*Some
This is a particularly unimpressive piece on squatting, redeemed only by the fact that the author did actually speak to a squatter (often they don’t).
To take just two criticisms, firstly I think it’s hilarious that on a blog professing to foster left unity (yeah, whatever Ken Loach) this article is written by a self-proclaimed “Marxist communist” who can’t wait to destroy any potential unity from the squat scene by slagging off political squats run by “autonomists who regularly held lengthy meetings.” It’s probably for best that there is a warning at the end of the article reminding us that “opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the position of Left Unity.”
Secondly and more seriously, I am super irritated by Reich’s unsubstantiated claim that “Now most ‘political squats’ in Europe are gone, and to my knowledge, they have not brought any fundamental change regarding the housing situation anywhere.” If Reich wants to write on squatting, then Reich should do a little bit of research first. In Brighton, where I live, squatting has saved many places from demolition and there are clear examples of squatters applying pressure on the council with positive results (Unemployed Centre, Phoenix Gallery, Trumpton, Lewes Road Community Garden, Ainsworth House etc etc)
In London, there are loads of examples stretching from the 1970s (Tolmer Village, Villa Road, Bonnington Square) to the present day (Grow Heathrow, Rochester Square, Colorama, Eileen House). And of course there are many examples from Europe and further afield, but perhaps Reich has never heard of Christiana, or Tacheles, or Ruigoord, or how Amsterdam wouldn’t be the cute city we know today if squatters had not comprehensively defeated city planners in the 1970s in the Nieuwmarktbuurt.
But Reich’s warped perspective as a Marxist Communist is clear. Reich’s “vision on what I would like to see happen may be a bit clearer than Nico’s.” Or mine or your’s. Reich thinks the self-organised movement for housing in 1946 occurred when “Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain.” Far from it. In their usual style Communists first condemned the movement and then sought to capitalise on it.
I can at least agree with Reich that “Today, as the housing situation deteriorates, one can well imagine a squatting campaign taking off.” Things are certainly heading in that direction. But if people are going to make a commentary on a grassroots self-organised movement and to attempt to foster some left unity, they should leave their ideological baggage outside the squat.
In fairness, it is quite hard to see the squat for all the TSG:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2339503/Hundreds-riot-police-Londons-streets-officers-raid-squat-HQ-G8-protesters.html
Hello Housing War
>a self-proclaimed “Marxist communist” who can’t wait to destroy any potential unity from the squat scene by slagging off political squats run by “autonomists who regularly held lengthy meetings.”
I think you have some serious preconceptions, imagining me as some sort of inhumane bolshevik robocop. What I describe here are my subjective impressions of European autonomists when I was a teenage punk rocker. They did hold lengthy meetings – they usually spent them accusing each other of real or imagined deficiencies in the most dramatic manner, presenting themselves as impeccable, and engaging in a sort of olympics of oppression. I was young. They didn’t rock my world.
In hindsight, I think they had very little on offer politically – most of it could be summed up as radical bravado and romantic revolutionary posturing.
Was everything about the autonomists negative? Not at all, and I mention that clearly in my piece: I “admire” the democratic principle they applied. They were also organised enough to provide great spaces for gigs *.
I lived squats of a different type. They were chaotic, and not all my memories of them are good – but I still preferred them at the time. That’s just the truth. I’m sorry you perceive my personal recollections as a concerted attempt to “destroy potential unity” – you’re taking them far too seriously.
*though historically speaking, their influence on the punk scene of the 1980s-90s was not unproblematically positive: it lost much of its subversive humour and swapped it for a po-faced ‘political correctness’, which did not necessarily further the punks’ critical consciousness
>Secondly and more seriously, I am super irritated by Reich’s unsubstantiated claim that “Now most ‘political squats’ in Europe are gone, and to my knowledge, they have not brought any fundamental change regarding the housing situation anywhere.”
Very well. You may have noticed the little phrase “to my knowledge” and the impressionistic character of my article. To my memory, so-called political squats were an entirely subcultural affair – everything was about the ‘scene’ and about maximum separation from society rather than changing it.
Take the Hafenstrasse in Hamburg – a former squatting mile. The town council ultimately sold the buildings to the ex-autonomists at symbolic prices. Once the revolutionaries got what they wanted, most of them withdrew from politics altogether and enjoyed their easy new lifestyles. Good for them. But I don’t see how this changed the housing situation for the people of Hamburg, where rents are horrid and homelessness persists.
I’m glad you provide some examples where squats brought some local changes (or prevented them). For what it’s worth, I support squatting. My problem remains that these changes are not nearly massive enough. Hence I argue for coordinated mass squatting campaigns rather than minority direct action – and that would only be a beginning. I believe such a campaign would be more effective if politically organised in a particular way. Then we might have what I’d consider “fundamental” change.
>But Reich’s warped perspective as a Marxist Communist is clear. Reich’s “vision on what I would like to see happen may be a bit clearer than Nico’s.” Or mine or your’s.
Yawn… I’m talking to a young guy who knows the situtation stinks but has no idea what can be done about it. He tells me as much. I’ve got an idea what I’d like to be done. Hence, my vision of “what I would like to see happen” is clearer than his, whether my vision is correct or not. Simple.
Funny I got on with this involuntary squatter just fine. I wrote the piece to draw attention to the situation of people like him – make it come alive rather than just being a statistic. But you still manage to somehow read it as a diatribe against squatters. Maybe that’s because your basic desire to caricature me as a presumptuous political commissar overrides your reading comprehension skills.
Talk about ‘political baggage’…
>Reich thinks the self-organised movement for housing in 1946 occurred when “Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain.” Far from it. In their usual style Communists first condemned the movement and then sought to capitalise on it.
Communists say the CP helped launching the campaign, anarchos say it didn’t. Big surprise. I’ve read convincing accounts by communists and non-communists testifying to the former version. I yet have to read convincing accounts to the contrary. Would it surprise me if it turned out that the stalinised CP of 1946 “first condemned the movement”? Not really. But it would be nice to learn that it got something right for a change. As things stand, I’m inclined to believe that it did.
Just briefly on the Communist Party influence.
According to number sources, the ‘official’ CP was supportive of the squatting campaign from the outset. According to some, it had its own tactical reasons: there was plenty of hostility between ‘ordinary’ British squatters and the members of General Anders’ Polish army in exile, which refused to go back to Poland. The CP did not want an army of demobbed anti-Communist soldiers around and supported the ‘ordinary’ squatters against them, partly by appealing to British chauvinist sentiments.
According to Paul Burnham’s essay, The Squatters of 1946, the early occupations in August 1946, “may have been planned by individuals in some localities (groups of ex-soldiers, or occasionally, groups of Labour party and Communist party members), but it had its own dynamic…”
By September, “the Communist party led squatting in five luxury blocks of flats in Central London.” It linked the squatting campaign to a political demand for a “national effort to build houses”.
In the same month, “five leading Communist squatters, who were all elected local Councillors, were arrested, imprisoned, and charged with the novel offence of conspiracy to trespass.”
Elsewhere in the UK, Communist Party activists were equally instrumental – such as in Daws Hill, where the biggest former POW camp was “squatted by an initiative of Labour Party members and Communists.”
According to Burham, “squatting worked to promote council housing nationally, by the fear it instilled at the top of society, by the agitation of the Communist Party, and by the important intermediate role played by the ex-squatter Labour Councillors like Wally Wright, Harry Slight and George Fairbairn… Similarly, a layer of new members joined the Communist party out of the squatting”.
Alas, the Communists also “brought the London squatting to an end after ten days (…) partly perhaps because of the ferocity of the government’s response, but also because the CP had a perspective of critical support of the Labour government in 1946”.
http://www.chalfontstgiles.org.uk/Squatters.pdf
All of this is interesting history, and IMO there are positive and negative lessons to be drawn here. The fact that the CP brought some serious organisational and agitational muscle to the squatting campaign seems fairly uncontroversial to me.
Even those squatters who politically distanced themselves from the CP politically regarded it, at the very least, as a “means to draw attention to their plight.”
https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofhumanities/history/exhistoria/volume4/Webber-Squatters_movement.pdf
Similarly, my original claim that “Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain” seems fully justified. They did. Your account, which counterposes a pure-as-snow grassroots movement to sinister outside forces merely capitalising on other people’s work is not only simplistic. It also rather resembles the version that the rightwing press was churning out at the time, which acknowledged the ‘legitimate concerns’ of hard-working people who had a “robust common sense…[in taking] matters quietly but firmly into their own hands” (Daily Mail, 10 August 1946), but saw the “greatest threat” as “residing in the Communist Party itself” (The Spectator, 19 September 1946). Divide and rule.
To criticise the CP’s motifs and its strategic objective of implementing a national ‘socialism’ by ‘forcing the Labour to the left’ is one thing. To deny that plenty of those ordinary grassroots squatters were also Communist Party activists and supporters is quite another.
Just briefly on the Communist Party influence.
According to a number of sources, the ‘official’ CP was supportive of the squatting campaign from the outset. According to some, it had its own tactical reasons: there was plenty of hostility between ‘ordinary’ British squatters and the members of General Anders’ Polish army in exile, which refused to go back to Poland. The CP did not want an army of demobbed anti-Communist soldiers around and supported the ‘ordinary’ squatters against them, partly by appealing to British chauvinist sentiments.
According to Paul Burnham’s essay, The Squatters of 1946, the early occupations in August 1946, “may have been planned by individuals in some localities (groups of ex-soldiers, or occasionally, groups of Labour party and Communist party members), but it had its own dynamic…”
By September, “the Communist party led squatting in five luxury blocks of flats in Central London.” It linked the squatting campaign to a political demand for a “national effort to build houses”.
In the same month, “five leading Communist squatters, who were all elected local Councillors, were arrested, imprisoned, and charged with the novel offence of conspiracy to trespass.”
Elsewhere in the UK, Communist Party activists were equally instrumental – such as in Daws Hill, where the biggest former POW camp was “squatted by an initiative of Labour Party members and Communists.”
According to Burham, “squatting worked to promote council housing nationally, by the fear it instilled at the top of society, by the agitation of the Communist Party, and by the important intermediate role played by the ex-squatter Labour Councillors like Wally Wright, Harry Slight and George Fairbairn… Similarly, a layer of new members joined the Communist party out of the squatting”.
Alas, the Communists also “brought the London squatting to an end after ten days (…) partly perhaps because of the ferocity of the government’s response, but also because the CP had a perspective of critical support of the Labour government in 1946?.
http://www.chalfontstgiles.org.uk/Squatters.pdf
All of this is interesting history, and IMO there are positive and negative lessons to be drawn here. The fact that the CP brought some serious organisational and agitational muscle to the squatting campaign seems fairly uncontroversial to me.
Even those squatters who politically distanced themselves from the CP politically regarded it, at the very least, as a “means to draw attention to their plight.”
https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofhumanities/history/exhistoria/volume4/Webber-Squatters_movement.pdf
Similarly, my original claim that “Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain” seems fully justified. They did. Your account, which counterposes a pure-as-snow grassroots movement to sinister outside forces merely capitalising on other people’s work is not only simplistic. It also rather resembles the version that the rightwing press was churning out at the time, which acknowledged the ‘legitimate concerns’ of hard-working people who had a “robust common sense…[in taking] matters quietly but firmly into their own hands” (Daily Mail, 10 August 1946), but saw the “greatest threat” as “residing in the Communist Party itself” (The Spectator, 19 September 1946). Divide and rule.
To criticise the CP’s motifs and its strategic objective of implementing a national ‘socialism’ by ‘forcing the Labour to the left’ is one thing. To deny that plenty of those ordinary grassroots squatters were also Communist Party activists and supporters is quite another.
Hi thanks for your two long replies, which I’d like to make a response to here.
My first original criticism was that it seems strange to be making politically divisive comments in an article on the leftunity website. With your reply, you just seem to be digging your hole deeper on that score.
My second criticism was that it’s a deeply ill-informed claim to say that “Now most ‘political squats’ in Europe are gone, and to my knowledge, they have not brought any fundamental change regarding the housing situation anywhere.” I’ve mentioned here (above) and on twitter the many projects which have influenced society at large. Your response appears to be along the lines that individual projects don’t change anything and we need an organised squatting movement led from above, whereas I would argue that housing justice comes via self-organised action from below. And therefore individual projects can accomplish massive social change and also be inspiring for all. I’ve given you plenty of examples to back up that assertion, above and on twitter.
https://twitter.com/housingwar/statuses/361938913041973249
https://twitter.com/housingwar/statuses/361949426954149889
Curiously, you do however admit that the 1946 occupations did have an impact regarding the housing situation. Perhaps that is because you believe it was driven from above, by the Communist Party. In your ‘not so’ brief response above you say:
“Communists say the CP helped launching the campaign, anarchos say it didn’t. Big surprise. I’ve read convincing accounts by communists and non-communists testifying to the former version. I yet have to read convincing accounts to the contrary. Would it surprise me if it turned out that the stalinised CP of 1946 “first condemned the movement”? Not really. But it would be nice to learn that it got something right for a change. As things stand, I’m inclined to believe that it did.”
I have a few comments on that statement. Certainly, the history of the post World War II squatters movement is under-documented. I’m currently writing something on it myself. In addition to the Webber and Burnham papers you refer to, there are two other useful pieces by J.Hinton and A.Friend. I can send you pdfs of both if you like. And, of course, there are the writings of Colin Ward.
Friend, A. (1980) ‘The Post War Squatters’, in Wates, N. & Wolmar, C. ‘Squatting: the Real Story’ Bay Leaf Books
Hinton, J. (1980) ‘Self-help and socialism: the squatters’ movement of 1946′ in History Workshop Journal 25
James Hinton is definitely arguing for Communist influence: indeed he says:
”Previous assessments, relying heavily on contemporary coverage in the anarchist newspaper ‘Freedom’ have tended to underestimate Communist involvement. ‘It was only in London’ wrote Ron Bailey in 1973, ‘that [the communists] were really active – and even there it was certainly not the communists who inspired the movement despite the impression given by part of the press and fostered by the CP itself.’ This is wrong.”
Whereas I suppose you might take that as evidence of Communist involvement, it merely makes me question why Bailey’s opinion is dismissed so easily. Apparently (declares a footnote) Bailey misread the evidence presented by DM Hill in a piece on the trial of the Communist Party members arrested as a result of the hotel squats in London (but this actually seems to back up Bailey’s argument if anything since he says they only had influence in London – although, yes Webber also supplies the example of Daws Hill). The same footnote also baldly declares that “A similar underestimation of the Communist role is apparent in other previous accounts of these events” and then Hinton lists THREE other pieces, including Friend. I’m not sure what gives Hinton the right to declare a total of four other accounts wrong, especially when, as he admits, they were based on contemporary sources.
Of course, from a perspective looking back almost seventy years later, it’s hard to find the truth of the matter. But it would seem unlikely to me that the Communist Party were responsible for the squatting wave. And it’s unfair to assess the entire movement which began in 1945 by a few events in London, which occurred in late 1946 and certainly did have Communist Party involvement.
In fact, to press home this point, despite you claiming that “according to a number of sources, the ‘official’ CP was supportive of the squatting campaign from the outset,” even Burnham, the source you rely on most, says that:
“The Communist Party argued that just as in wartime the Mulberry harbours had been designed and built before the D-Day landings, now a similar national effort to build houses was needed. But the war was over, private property interests came before housing need, and the people were therefore advised to wait for houses.”
But people were not going to wait. Like Webber and Burnham, Andrew Friend writes about the Brighton Vigilantes (also known as the Secret Committee of Ex-Servicemen) who started squatting empty properties in mid-1945. He notes that squatting spread to “cities like Birmingham, Liverpool and London.” He is at pains to point out that this movement was “the result of local initiatives rather than an organised extension of of activity by the Brighton group.”
Later he says that “by 1946, 45,000 people were thought to be squatting at 1,000 sites throughout the United Kingdom. The camp squats represented direct action and self-organisation of the homeless on a massive scale.”
So when you say “Similarly, my original claim that “Communist Party activists helped launching a massive squatting campaign across Britain” seems fully justified,” I would vehemently disagree.
And I do not think it’s just me who would disagree. The following is taken from Past Tense’s radical history walk around Bloomsbury in 2006, which started out from The Square, a squatted social centre:
“The Communist Party was heavily involved in these London actions, though there has been argument over how dominant they were in the squatting movement nationally, initially they rubbished the early autonomous squatters then jumped on the bandwagon when it became obvious how the movement was taking off. Then [they] took things over and repressed independent activity. Sound familiar?”
http://www.alphabetthreat.co.uk/pasttense/walks/bloomsbury.rtf?
By the way, I’m not sure why you mention these writings now rather than in the original piece. If you have just gone away and read them, that’s cool, if you had included them originally then I perhaps wouldn’t have accused you of writing such an ill-informed article.
And in case you feel inclined to respond that 1945-6 was a mass squatting action the likes of which have never been seen again, I’ll remind you that similar numbers of people or more were squatting in the mid-1970s (40,000-50,000 is the commonly used figure). Did they effect change? Certainly. As just one example, without the move into co-operatives (some currently getting evicted in Lambeth) and the GLC squatters amnesty, central London would look very differerent. Further, the squatters movement persists to this day. Who knows how many squatters are squatting currently? No-one. The figure of 20,000 is bandied about a lot. That’s not an insubstantial number. This article is about the continuity (and ebbs and flows) of the movement in London and Brighton:
The Right to Decent Housing and A Whole Lot More Besides – Examining the Modern English Squatters Movement at its Beginnings and in the Present Day.
http://www.academia.edu/3218544/The_Right_to_Decent_Housing_and_A_Whole_Lot_More_Besides_-_Examining_the_Modern_English_Squatters_Movement_at_its_Beginnings_and_in_the_Present_Day
I don’t think this movement for housing justice should be a left-wing or a right-wing issue. I prefer to frame it in moral terms. Property which is not in use should be put to good purpose. “Robust common sense…[in taking] matters quietly but firmly into their own hands” sounds about right, shame the Mail has now changed its tune into facilitating a moral panic around criminal, threatening, young(!) and very very scary foreign squatters.
Yet the scandal of empty properties continues today. There are more than 700,000 empty homes in the United Kingdom. A Shelter report mentioned in the above article recently declared that:
“Britain is now at the centre of a perfect storm of housing problems. High and rising rents, the cripplingly high costs of getting on the housing ladder and the lowest peacetime building figures since the 1920s have all combined with a prolonged economic downturn to increase the pressure on families.”
This is terrible. But the lesson from the 1940s and the 1970s would be that in a severe housing crisis, people of all stripes will take action to house themselves.