Fighting the bedroom tax: a view from Liverpool Left Unity

we won’t take this lying down!

Protesters across the city, as part of a nationwide fight to oppose the introduction of the bedroom tax, recently marched up the city streets to St George’s Plateau to hear speakers and discuss follow up action. About 5-600 people or more combined two marches to wend their way shouting and chanting through traffic from Derby Square to the end at William Brown Street.

The bedroom tax is hated as an attack on people with little money and an attack on families. In the past, once you finally got a council house, you were out of the clutches of private landlords and could build a home for your family for as long as you wanted to stay there. This is another attempt to spread fear, to discipline working class communities and to defeat the spirit of struggle.

The bedroom tax has thrown up a new set of activists, working one to one with their fellow tenants, determined to end this hated imposition which hits those with least. Tenants are ‘gobsmacked’ that Labour will not promise to reverse it. What’s Labour for then?

 What is different? And what is the same? Different is the new layers of speakers and groups formed to oppose both Tory, Labour and housing officials, old are the proposals for tactics, being reasonable with officialdom etc. and waiting for a New Labour government, to be elected. The number of small groups being set up in the neighbourhoods is encouraging. The way people strive to find new ways to support each other is inspiring.

What was offered at the rally was a mixed bag of Keynesian and free market claptrap in which Britain’s version of the American dream, those of setting your own business up, be your own boss! This garbage is reeled out as something new, alternative to capitalism. We don’t need publicly owned services, free healthcare for all or even a house anymore. We need to be strivers not skivers utilising all the space we need to live, and not taking from those without.

Whispers are heard, they say wait and we’ll ameliorate the conditions or legally challenge the situation. Promises are made, patience is a virtue, marking time is a strategy. Fabian style, wait and we will fight, but let’s get the local elections and Labour in power first. Then we can talk of combat, to reverse the impact, or the biding of our time till the alternative is to be built in the future under Labour leader Ed. Bah humbug!

The main, immediate, tactic everywhere seems to be legal appeal challenges; that is to question the rule in its application to you on whatever grounds. Each case is specific to an individual, as with welfare rights. A decisive Uniform bloc tactic is not an option; precedents will only allow councils to oppose us en masse. For these appeals, by law they need only give months’ notice for us to be informed, so from March, if mailed out, April is the deadline.

There are demonstrations being organised outside courts and supporting each other in court.

Delaying an answer or requesting information from the council in respect of whether spare room constitutes a spare room or a storage space is also a useful manoeuvre. Throughout the country various methods are being tried, out some more successful than others.

This movement is in its infancy but already elements of the far right are trying to infiltrate it. The movement needs to be alert to this danger.

Liverpool may be more affected than some due to poverty and lack of smaller tenancies.

Websites run by well-meaning individuals with housing ‘know how’ are generally producing statistics – all very fine, but on the ground local groups across Merseyside have formed into a sort of collective federation to help generalise tactics and give support where needed.

Trade unions like Unite are sponsoring groups, providing space and facilities for activism to local people. They promise to help us resist evictions with action, have thrown open their offices, and community branches lend physical support and political advice, as well as budgeting and welfare information; thus isolation and fear of eviction are overcome as the authorities turn the screw.

We need Unite nationally to either exert real pressure on Labour to oppose the tax, promise to abolish it, and throw resources into the struggle to defeat it, or Unite to divert its resources to those who will.

There are petitions aplenty, with local groups focusing on preventing rent increases or asking housing associations not to implement evictions. More needs to be done; more will be done.

The real inner processes of change and transformation and transitions in the city’s political make up will come in the battle over private property, private landlordism and the sell-out of social principles, to New Labour’s economic doctrine. This has to be and will be fought out on the streets like every great point of principle in politics, in a revolutionary way. Local politicians will and are being exposed, challenged, fought and questioned over where they stand. They are either with you or in your way! Time will show which side of the barricades they are on.

“A spare room keeps a family together. It allows teenagers to have their own bedrooms; it allows parents to help older children pick up the pieces if they come home at a time of crisis; it allows the adult child to come home to look after a poorly parent when they come home from hospital; it allows the divorcee to have children to stay; it allows couples to sleep separately if one is ill or recovering from an operation; it allows the younger disabled child to have their own room; and so on. Houses and flats provided by councils and housing associations represent people’s homes. They are not transit camps or hostels, with people constantly on the move as families expand and contract, but places to settle, put down roots and overcome some of the disadvantages that life has thrown at them.” (Lord Best Cross bencher in the House of Lords).

Children lose the right to a room of their own or at least to a room shared only with those of the same gender. Its means kids might have to move school. The tax ignores all the research about how the presence of healthy elders helps prevent mental illness in the younger generation and helps the cognitive development of children. In many strong working class families some children have long slept at Nana’s while mum worked or even had a break. It’s a strong and healthy tradition.

Fight the bedroom tax. Don’t worry alone. Link the struggle across the UK.