‘We put the Emergency Brake on the Runaway Train’.

Politicised community resistance to exclusionary regeneration in Haringey, London

Author: Megan McDermott (11723262)

Supervisor: Dr. Polly Pallister Wilkins.

Second reader: Dr. David Laws.

June 2018.

MA: Conflict Resolution and Governance.

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam.

Word count: 29,400

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Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.

- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

*******

Acknowledgments.

To the people of Haringey for opening their doors and minds to me.

To Dr. Polly Pallister Wilkins for bringing me to this case and being so energised by its story.

To Dr. David Laws for his advice and patience with us all.

To Dr. Michelle Parlevliet for bringing alive for me the centrality of socioeconomic rights.

To my mother for transferring via years of osmosis an excitement for sensible urban planning.

To Nicky and Alice for being my home away from home.

Go raibh mile maith agaibh go léir.

*******

Cover artwork: View of Broadwater Farm estate in Haringey. Kindly contributed by Inga Bystram, Broadwater Farm resident.

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Table of contents.

Maps of Haringey ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5

List of interviewees and affiliations ……………………………………………………………………………………… 6

List of Persons mentioned …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8

List of organisations and groups mentioned ………………………………………………………………………… 8

1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 10

1.2. Organisation of thesis and research questions …..…………………………………………………………. 11

2. Background ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 12

2.1. The democratic deficit in UK local councils …………………………………………………………..………. 12

2.2. The ‘depoliticisation’ of local councils …………………………………………………………………………… 13

2.3. A shortage of housing and social housing ………..……………………………………………………………. 14

2.4 The managed decline of council estates …………………………………………………………………………. 14

2.5. The demunicipalization of council housing ………………………………………………………………….…15

2.6. Stock transfers as an example of demunicipalization ……………………………………………………...15

2.7. Council estate demolition ……………………………………………………………………………………………..16

2.8. An ideological policy of central government ……………………………………………………………….... 17

2.9. A lack of options for local councils ………………………………………………………………………………... 18

2.10. London’s housing activism ………………………………………………………………………………………… 19

3. Defining Stop-HDV as a social movement ………………………………………………………………………… 21

4. Structural challenges to the anti-HDV movement …………………………………………………………….. 22

5. Theoretical Framework…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 23

5.1 Political mediation ……………………………………………………………………………….……………………… 23

5.2. Strategic Networking ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 24

5.3. Framing …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 25

5.4.Summary of theories and their connection .….…………….…………………………………………………. 26

6. Research Design ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 27

6.1. Why a case study? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 27

6.2. Why this case? …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 28

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6.3. Research method: interviews and observation ……………………………………………………………. 29

6.4. Ethics and limitations ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 31

7. Introduction to case ………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 32

7.1. Activist’s description of case ………………………………………………………………………………………… 33

7.2. Barriers to the campaign outlined ………………………………………………………………………………... 38

7.3. Politics as a strategy: Engaging political opportunities ………………………………………………….. 41

7.4. Summary …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 43

8. Analysis ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 44

Chapter 1: Political but not party political …………………………………………………………………………… 44

1.1. Structuring the campaign to attract a certain network ……………………………………………... 44 1.2. United behind Corbyn: a politically mediated frame ………………………………………………... 47 1.3. Broad network providing protection from criticism ……………………..………………………….. 48 1.4. Harmony at the expense of debate ………………………………………………………………………….. 49 1.5. Summary ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 50

Chapter 2 : Keeping politics grounded in the community ……………………………………………………... 51

2.1. Importance of community involvement ………………………………………………………………….. 51 2.2. Challenges to affected population involvement ……………………………………………………….. 52 2.3. Examples of potential for local involvement …………………………………………………………… 53 2.4. Strategies for involvement ………………………………………………………………………………… 54 2.4.1. Ambassadors of the community……………………………………………………………………..……… 54 2.4.2. Dissemination of social justice language ……………………………………………………………….. 54 2.5. Uncovering the political reality …………………………………………………………………………….. 56 2.6. Mutual dependence of political and non-political campaign elements ……………………… 58 2.7. Political dangers of a single issue campaign ……………………………………………………………. 61 2.8. Summary ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 63

Chapter 3: Broadening the impact of Stop-HDV …………………………………………………………………… 64

3.1. Mistaken for Momentum: A hindrance or a boost? …………………………………………………. 64 3.2. Networking via the campaign ………………………………………………………………………………... 65 3.3. Networking via political allies ………………………………………………………………………………. 67 3.4 Challenging the narrative ………………………………………………………………………………………. 70 3.5. Challenging the question ………………………………………………………………………………………. 71 3.6. Challenging the image …………………………………………………………………………………………… 72 3.7 Summary ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 80

9. Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 80

9.1. Relevance of research ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 80

9.2. Summary of findings and lessons learned ……………………………………………………………………... 80

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9.3. Potential future research ……………………………………………………………………………………………... 82

9.4. Reflection and closing remarks …………………………………………………………………………………….. 83

10. Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 85

Map of election wards in Haringey.

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List of interviewees

Florence Allaway

- Stop HDV campaigner - Labour Party member - Social housing tenant

Paul Burnham

- Member of the Socialist Workers Party. - Secretary of Haringey Defend Council Housing. - Former housing officer. - Council tenant. - Formerly worked in the engineering union.

Alison Davey

- Member of Northumberland Park Decides. - Former children and family social worker. - Organises a weekly community cook-up and housing consultation for local residents in need. - Private home owner in Northumberland Park ward.

Simon Hester

- Member of the Socialist Workers Party. - Member of Unite trade union - Member of Haringey Defend Council Housing.

Sue Hughes

- Stop-HDV campaigner - Labour Party member

Dave Morris

- Secretary of Haringey Federation of Residents Associations. - Defendant in 10 year libel case concerning a campaign against McDonalds which became the longest running libel case in English history.

Paul Nicholson

- Retired reverend. - Founder of Tax Payers Against Poverty, a protest movement against council taxation of benefits.

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- commissioned the Minimum Income Standards research from the Family Budget Unity in 1999 which was used by UNISON and London Citizens to persuade Ken Livingstone, as Mayor of London, to introduce the London Living Wage.

Gordon Peters

- Stop-HDV campaigner who took a judicial review against the HDV. - Former member of the Green Party. - Retired social services director. - Chair of the older people’s reference group, a mechanism for the voice of frail elderly into the council and the health service. - Formerly taught Social Policy at University of West London for social workers and community organisers

Phil Rose

- Member of the Labour Party. - Former Chair of Haringey Momentum. - Retired Housing officer. - Member of Unite trade union. - Works with homelessness organisation - Degree in Social Policy

Gemma Short

- Secretary of Haringey Momentum. - Member of socialist movement Workers Liberty - Member of Hornsey and Wood Green Grassroots Left in West Haringey.

Franklin Thomas

- Member of Northumberland Park Decides. - Council tenant on Northumberland Park estate.

Doug Thorpe

- Member of London-based Radical Housing Network. - Member of Haringey Defend Council Housing

Natasha Sivanandan.

- Stop-HDV campaigner - Social justice activist

Joy Wallice

- Stop HDV Campaigner - Recent Labour Party member - Social housing tenant

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List of persons mentioned

Jeremy Corbyn

- Labour Party leader since 2015.

Sadiq Kahn

- Current Mayor of London. Labour Party.

Claire Kober

- Ex Labour Party Councillor. Former leader of Haringey Council.

Boris Johnson

- Former Mayor of London. Conservatives.

Alan Strickland

- Ex Labour Party Councillor. Former Cabinet member for regeneration and housing for Haringey Council.

John Lansman

- Founder of Momentum and recent appointee to the Labour Party National Executive Committee.

List of groups and organisations mentioned

Stop-HDV.

- Community based campaign against the Haringey Development Vehicle regeneration project.

National Momentum.

- A grassroots movement set up to support the leadership and socialist vision of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the face of internal dissatisfaction in the Labour Party after Corbyn’s 2015 election. Originally open to members of any political party and later restricted to Labour Party members.

Haringey Labour Momentum.

- Haringey’s branch of Momentum.

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Haringey Defend Council Housing.

- Haringey branch of a cross-party national campaign around issues of affordable housing. DCH emerged in 1998 out of a decade-long campaign for resident’s ballots during the transfer of council housing into the control of housing associations.

Socialist Workers Party

Radical Housing Network

- Cross London network of individuals and housing campaigns.

Northumberland Park Decides

- Group of tenants and residents of Northumberland park area and estate formed to oppose the effect of the HDV on their area.

Tottenham Labour Group & Hornsey, Wood Green Labour Group

- The two constituencies of Haringey.

Unite Trade Union

- Britain’s largest trade union and an affiliate of the Labour Party.

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1. Introduction

This thesis is concerned with grassroots opposition to neoliberal government policies1 that conflict with the perceived interests of vulnerable/marginalised communities. In this vein it looks at the strategic opposition of local communities to privatisation policies, one of the central tenants of neoliberal policy. It follows the case of community opposition to a specific regeneration project by the Labour-led local council in the London Borough of Haringey called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV). The largest public-private partnership in the history of the UK, the project would have seen the transfer of £2 billion worth of council assets including housing, schools, libraries and a civic centre into this joint ‘vehicle’ controlled by the council and property developer Lend Lease, something many campaigners considered a commercial company. For those fighting against it, the development became a symbol of a broken housing system run by a political establishment that was failing to serve or listen to the public. In a letter to the Guardian newspaper in July 2017 one London resident summarised the views expressed by many of those vehemently opposed to the proposal.

There is something rotten at the heart of Haringey council democracy, and the proposed deal with Lend Lease is the latest sign of a sick politics. Residents are disadvantaged in participating in decisions about their homes and businesses, and are cynical about the access developers have bought with their sponsorship and hospitality (The Guardian Letters, 2017).

Gordon Peters, a leading anti-HDV campaigner who took a legal case against the development in the High Court described the perception of locals who felt they were never consulted by their council regarding a project that proposed to uproot their lives.

It is very top down. There is one singular, large-scale approach and that is it. Some people knew nothing until they found a red line in plans around their house meaning it was scheduled for demolition (Construction News, 2018).

Opposition to the proposal was fronted by a campaign called Stop-HDV, a single issue, community based organisation formed explicitly to campaign against the development. Much of the attention garnered by Stop-HDV was shared with Momentum, a grassroots movement that emerged in 2015 to support Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. While this research has found the

1 Exact definitions of neoliberalism are contested. Here neoliberal policies are understood to follow an ideological model that relies on the free market to distribute resources and values minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs as illustrated in Britain by the privatisation of public services under the Conservative Party during the 1980s followed by the Labour Party’s official abandonment of its commitment to the ‘common ownership of the means of production’ in the 1990s.

10 widespread belief that Momentum was heavily involved in the campaign to be false, the mere idea of its involvement played an influential role in how events unfolded.

The campaign became explicitly political when it brought about the controversial resignation of the long-time Labour leader of the council and the deselection, resignation or retirement of those councillors who supported the scheme, in what some sections of British society considered a purge by the hard left. The shake-up of the council is indicative of an ideological schism within the national Labour Party between what have been labelled ‘neoliberal Blairites’ and ‘socialist Corbynites’. The conflict within the borough has developed into a notable national media frenzy as commentators divide along political lines. A brief look at national headlines on the Haringey case gives a sense of this divided perception of events. Conservative newspapers such as The Telegraph depict a political coup by left-wing hardliners in Momentum: ‘The far Left’s hounding of a council leader brings home bad memories’ (The Telegraph, 2018); ‘The bullying at Haringey council gives a taste of what life would be like under Momentum's Labour’ (The Telegraph ,2018). Meanwhile the left-wing Guardian describes ‘The ideological battle for decent housing and decent politics in Haringey’ (The Guardian Letters, 2017), ‘Lives torn apart and assets lost: this is what a Labour privatisation would mean’ (Chakrabortty, 2017) and insists that ‘In Haringey the people have taken over, not the hard left’ (Chakrabortty, 2018). Beyond the borders of the borough, the halting of the project has sent shockwaves through other London councils. In August the neighbouring Camden Council decided against a HDV style development, opting instead for a community-led project. This is a rare case of a community successfully calling a halt to what appeared to many as the unstoppable progress of private development in the city of London. As one campaigner put it:

The [Stop] HDV is a wider victory in a way in that we, like that Walter Benjamin quote, we ‘put the emergency brake on the runaway train’ (Gordon Peters)2.

1.2. Organisation of thesis and research questions

This thesis begins with a brief background of the Haringey case in the context of London’s local governance structures and its ongoing housing crisis. That is followed by a description of the three central theories used to help explain the success of the campaign, namely Political Mediation, Networking and Framing. A methodology section will explore the reason for choosing a case study for this research and justify the choice of Haringey as a case. It will then outline the research methods of interviewing and observation and briefly consider some of the

2 The original quote from Benjamin appears in his final manuscripts as ‘Marx says revolutions are the locomotive of history. But perhaps this isn’t so at all. Perhaps revolutions occur when the human species, travelling in this train, reaches for the emergency break’ (Offe 1996: 41). .

11 limitations and ethical considerations of such research. Analysis of the case is divided into three chapters which in essence outline three of the core lessons of the campaign’s successful engagement with politics: Make it political but not party-political; keep the politics grounded in the community; and broaden the impact of the campaign beyond the borough via narrative and networks. In combination with the selected theories these chapters hope to answer the core research puzzle: what is the impact of politicised campaigning in the fight against exclusionary regeneration projects. In the course of this analysis sub questions to be explored are: how does such a campaign contribute to a stronger city or nation-wide movement or platform for similar issues; and, in doing so how does the campaign ensure that the voices of each boroughs affected population are not lost in the crowd.

2. Background

2.1. The democratic deficit in UK local councils The idea that local council democracy is ‘rotten’ is more than the angry outburst of a disillusioned citizen. The decline and dismantlement of local democracy in the UK has been tracked by numerous scholars as a phenomena going back to the 1980s, the conclusion being that local authorities in the UK have become depoliticised and undemocratic (Raco 2014, Copus, Sweeting, and Wingfield 2013). The work of Mike Raco, Chair of Urban Governance and Development at the Bartlett School of Planning, provides the context for the HDV development and the relationship between government, local authorities, private partners, and citizens in the UK. It analyses the privatisation of key welfare sectors in the UK and the limitations this has put on their governance. It discusses the use of the term ‘sustainable development’ as means of legitimising ‘discourses of neoliberal capitalism and commodity-based expansion’ and moving towards a construction of democracy and governance that is purely pragmatic rather than ideological or political (2014: 2).

What Raco refers to as a post-political project focuses on output such as large scale regeneration projects as the main source of a local council’s legitimacy. This offers one explanation of local councils throughout the UK, Haringey being one, which are measured by the ‘success’ and efficiency of projects and service delivery at the same time as budgets are cut by central government. There has been a withdrawal of central government from local democracy under the guise of giving power back to the people. One example of such policy is then Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2010 ‘Big Society’ initiative whereby central government control over local matters was considered inefficient and bureaucratic. Responsibility was to be handed over to

12 local initiatives based on the idea of volunteerism, philanthropy and communities taking control of their own futures; a move that was criticised as a thinly vailed preparation for cuts to local services and a return to a Victorian era system of service provision (Watt 2010). Without the support of the national government, cash-strapped local authorities are forced to cede power to private partnerships, thus undermining the participation of the public: ‘corporations colonise an ever-expanding range of social, political, and environmental practices that used to be seen as the everyday responsibility of government and state bureaucracies’ (Raco: 2). This system ‘purposefully removes the institutional links between decision-making, accountability, and state practices’ (ibid).

It would be a mistake to consider the Haringey case as a black and white example of abandonment by the state. In fact the so-called ‘neoliberal era’ implemented by Tatcher and Reagan and continued under Blair and Brown saw an increase not a decrease in spending on the welfare state (Raco 2014: 4). Nor was there a reduction in the state’s shaping of public affairs. Between 1997 and 2008 the ‘New Labour’ governments of Blair and Brown passed over 300 new laws and regulations per year. According to Raco the UK is part of a trend whereby ‘many states in the Global North and South are spending ever-greater sums on both welfare programmes and the regulation of public and private welfare providers’ (2014: 4).

Yet, while the state expands, it simultaneously withdraws its voice and outsources its duties, making way for a new face of governance which considers ‘democratic engagement as a brake on modernisation and reform’ (Raco, 2014: 5). Efficient delivery of services by private actors trumps the participation of service users, leaving citizens with a significant ‘liberty cost’ regarding the openness and transparency they can expect from local government and outsourced, private service providers (Raco, 2014: 6). The state remains involved in the lives of citizens but it is not directly responsible and accountable in the way it once was.

2.2. The ‘depoliticisation’ of local councils

Raco’s argument that local councils have become ‘post-political’ or lacking in politics is a central tenant of this research. It is supported by Copus, Sweeting, and Wingfield who review the process by which local government has been delocalised and depoliticised in the English context to the point where it is seen first and foremost as a managerial tool for service provision. ‘Here democracy is achieved, not through the activities of candidates, parties and voters, but rather through citizens acting as consumers or customers’ (Copus, Sweeting, and Wingfield 2013: 391). Neoliberal and public value perspectives on this issue ‘further depoliticise local government by emphasising partnerships and networks as apolitical service orientated processes’ (ibid). From

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this perspective ‘politicians do not provide “value” through political and governing process, only through a contribution to the leadership and management of services’ (ibid: 392). The concept of local government as political or participatory is considered at best secondary and at worst an inconvenience.

One of the areas of the welfare state where this political structure manifest most clearly is in housing. This brief overview of the current state of council housing and estate regeneration in London will set the scene for the Haringey case and introduce some of the terms and issues raised by activists in interviews which are the basis of later analysis.

2.3. A shortage of housing and social housing

Since the late 1970s housing policies of privatisation under the Conservatives and so-called ‘modernisation’ under New Labour have had a particularly pernicious effect on London where the current housing crisis, though multifaceted, is perpetuated by the entrance of large scale global investors into the market (Watt & Minton 2016: 204, 206). The City continues to undergo what has been referred to as ‘gentrification on steroids—the growing corporatization of retail space and housing’ (ibid: 218). A 2015 study by housing and homelessness charity Shelter found that just 43 advertised properties in London were suitable for median-wage families (ibid: 207).

Social housing provision is the clearest point of interaction between such housing problems and the outsource-oriented local governance structure outlined above. The number of people waiting for a council home from London’s local authorities rose by over 80% from 1997 to 2006 and peaked in 2012 at over 380,000 (ibid: 205, 210). The two factors that contributed most to this shortage are the lack of council houses built by successive governments and a right to buy policy whereby tenants were allowed and encouraged3 to buy their property from the council. During the New Labour period, 1997–2010, a total of 340 new council homes were built in London (ibid: 210). Meanwhile the release of council-built homes into the private market meant that by 2014 at least 36% of ex-council homes in London were being re-let by private landlords (ibid: 208).

2.4. The managed decline of council estates Remaining council housing faced major cut backs beginning in the mid-1970s prompted by the ‘fiscal crisis of the state’. The Labour government of the time cut investment in maintenance, improvement and development of council housing, something which continued at a more severe

3 Watt and Minton consider the right to buy policy as the deliberate construction of a neoliberal housing system ‘since the Thatcherite state did not simply ‘leave well alone’, as in classical 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, but engineered private property and market creation by simultaneously increasing council rents and offering large discounts for sitting-tenant purchasers (Watt 207/208)

14 level under the Conservative governments from 1979–97. The idea of a council house as a desirable home for tenants began to fade as rents rose beyond inflation, maintenance and improvement fell away and right to buy policies demonstrated the government’s withdrawal from the concept of local authority housing (Ginsburg, 2005: 118). Reflecting the government’s lack of belief in local authorities as a direct provider of services, central government restraints on public borrowing prevented local authorities from accessing the funds required to maintain and improve council housing (ibid: 116, 118). As professor Norman Ginsburg described:

The spiral of decline over the 1980s and 1990s was, thus, largely engineered by governments, bolstered by an often zealous commitment to widening home ownership. Councils were hamstrung, unable to raise investment funds for maintenance, improvement and new development, and, yet, held politically responsible by tenants. Little wonder, then, that the local authorities looked around for alternatives (2005: 118, 119).

A preliminary knowledge of the central government and local council reactions to this crisis is important to understanding the alternative proposed by the local council in Haringey.

2.5. The demunicipalization of council housing In 2005 Ginsburg predicted the complete disappearance of council housing within the next twenty years because the previous two decades had, he claimed, been marked by ‘a more or less unrelenting demunicipalization of council housing’ (ibid: 115). ‘Demunicipalisation’ essentially refers to the handing over of council responsibilities to private contractors, primarily in one of three forms:

 The transfer of the council’s housing stock into a quasi-private housing authority.  Arms-length management organisations (ALMOs) which manage the homes while they remain officially owned by the council.  Private finance initiatives which facilitate private public partnerships where private companies complete and manage public project such as social housing.

The first two forms are currently in place in Haringey. The third is what will be introduced if the HDV and projects of its ilk succeed in the borough.

2.6. Stock transfers as an example of demunicipalization The first of these shifts of authority over social housing from councils to third parties is commonly referred to as stock transfer. It was introduced under the Conservative government’s Housing Act 1988 ‘which facilitated demunicipalisation by reducing the housing powers and

15 responsibilities of elected public local authorities’ (Watt & Minton: 209). This policy was continued under New Labour. The strategy, which did not substantially increase the supply of social rental homes, meant that renters were moved from secure tenancy to ‘assured’ tenancy which is less secure and more expensive (ibid: 210). It prompted tenants to campaigns for ballots of residents on each estate, a movement that later grew into a national organisation called Defend Council Housing. Stock transfers were regarded by DCH, trade unions and some within the Labour Party as a form of privatising social housing while New Labour considered it a necessary ‘modernisation’ (ibid). In reality it is a form of quasi-privatisation given that associations are partially state funded and work in coordination with local councils (Ginsburg: 116).

In line with the state’s focus on efficient service delivery outlined by Raco, New Labour’s support for stock transfers was intended to reflect its passion for pragmatism exemplified by Tony Blair’s endorsement of the policy: ‘what matters is what works’ (ibid). The move to transfer council housing into housing associations was described by Blair as ‘putting New Labour values into action’, which has ‘buried for good the old ideological split between public and private sector’ (ibid).

Stock transfers are not mentioned here to as a judgment of policy but rather as an illustration of the trend of diminished council responsibility and accountability for social housing. As Malpass and Mullins put it ‘Stock transfer is part of fragmentation of local governance, a process that has seen a range of services moved out of town halls and into the hands of independent provider organisations in the private and voluntary sectors’ (2010: 674). It illustrates the ideological stance of both Labour and the Conservative Party towards social housing as a service not to be directly provided by councils and provides an example of the subsequent erosion of council responsibility and accountability in that sector.

This ideology coupled with a policy of estate demolition as part of redevelopment strategies has led many to view such development plans as a process of ‘state-led gentrification’, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and the erosion of ordinary Londoners’ ‘right to the city’ (Watt & Minton: 211, 212).

2.7. Council estate demolition One of the most notable cases of council estate demolition and its effect on residents is the Heygate estate in Southwark, South London. It is seen by many as a prime example of the link between redevelopment and ‘social cleansing’. The estate was demolished between 2011 and

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2014 as part of a regeneration plan for the Elephant and Castle area, led by Lend Lease, the same developer chosen for Haringey. The project was met with major opposition from residents and campaigners which included some residents remaining in their homes long after the council had attempted to evict them. The result of the development was a reduction in social rental units from 1194 to 82 (Flynn 2016: 285), the development of luxury apartments of which the cheapest unit was a one bedroom flat for £310,000 (Steadman 2013), and the displacement of the previous occupants from the immediate area, often scattered over huge distances because the compensation they received was not sufficient to buy or rent in that area again (Watt & Minton: 212).

(Map showing the displacement of leaseholders of the Heygate estate created out of a research project by King's College London which culminated in the publication of 'Staying Put' - an anti- gentrification handbook for council estates in London. Source: Steadman 2013)

What occurred in Heygate is indicative of a trend within the city’s estate regeneration projects. The redevelopment of 50 London council estates between 2004 and 2014 saw a 50% increase in the number of regular homes to nearly 68,000 but a net loss of approximately 8,300 social rental homes (ibid). Analysis by Watt in 2015 estimated that since 2000 over 100 council-built estates ‘have been (or are going through or are likely to go through) either full or partial demolition as a result of renewal policies’ (ibid), making the fate of Stop-HDV an issue of interest throughout the city.

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2.8. An ideological policy of central government The link between government policies of estate demolition and ‘social improvement’ is widely acknowledged. In his 2016 pledge to demolish and rebuild the 100 worst ‘sink-estates’ in Britain, then Prime Minister David Cameron made a direct link between the London riots which began in Tottenham and the existence of council estates, a statement that would later be used among Haringey’s activists to argue that the borough was being ‘cleansed’ of its trouble makers via redevelopment:

The riots of 2011 didn’t emerge from within terraced streets or low-rise apartment buildings. As spatial analysis of the riots has shown, the rioters came overwhelmingly from these post-war estates. Almost 3 quarters of those convicted lived within them. That’s not a coincidence (Cameron 2010).

The policy of total rather than partial demolition and the choice of which sites to demolish is regarded by activists as politically and financially motivated, with estates sitting on increasingly valuable land often targeted for demolition and redevelopment. Architects for Social Housing, which works with council tenants on alternatives to demolition, argue that the demolition of estates is ‘actively produced out of the synergy between neoliberal politics and international finance capital’ (Watt & Minton: 205). In this regard Demunicipalization is considered by many as a matter of ideology rather than pragmatism.

2.9. A lack of options for local councils At a local level councils often find themselves victims of a system beyond their control. Indeed as Watt and Minton argue, ‘the motives of individual local councillors and housing professionals engaged in regeneration may not be accurately encompassed by such a wilful Machiavellian notion as “social cleansing”’ (ibid: 211). At local council level the issue is often a combination of funding shortages and borrowing caps drastically curtailing councillors options for housing provision, a need to increase council tax funds putting pressure on boroughs to attract high income earners, and a lack of strong enough ideological opposition to the situation to attempt any radical alternatives, regardless of the expressed desires of the communities themselves.

The combination of this desperation for funding and the situation described by Raco where councils have developed into managerial tools for efficient (meaning non-direct) service provision results in a ‘democratic deficit’ (ibid: 213) for many local communities whose councils cannot or will not meet their expressed needs. ‘Over 35 years of neo-liberal “reforms” have

18 shredded the capacity, but perhaps more importantly the willingness of London’s current local government bodies to properly accommodate Londoners’ (ibid: 218).

In summary a crisis of too little social housing and the consistent deterioration of councils’ remaining stock combined with a cross-party ideological move towards private provision of social housing has led to a situation whereby council estates are exposed to the market as fair game for development. It is a model which, in the case of London, has facilitated government promises of ‘social improvement’ and a drive by developers to maximise land use while at the same time leaving estate residents eager for improved housing but unsure of their future place in this system and wary of the negative impact observed in previous regeneration projects.

2.10. London’s housing activism The past five years have seen a series of high profile housing activisms emerge out of widespread discontent in the areas of affordable and social housing in London. Notable examples include the Focus E15 mothers who were evicted from their housing association and offered alternative housing in other cities as far away as Manchester and Birmingham. The campaign occupied empty council blocks to protest their treatment and the disuse of social housing units throughout the city. On the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark activists occupied buildings for two months in protest at the eviction of tenants for development, leading to the often employed criticism that opposition to regeneration is being led by ‘outside agitators’, unrepresentative of the residents themselves.

Occupation of estates is part of an arsenal of tactics developed by a growing movement of housing activists throughout London. This includes the kind of ‘resistance by design’ offered by Architects for Social Housing, the use of judicial reviews as seen in the Save Cressingham Gardens campaign, and the forensic dissection of council documents on planed regeneration used by the 35% campaign in Southwark. A group such as the Radical Housing Network also facilitate communication and networking between London’s campaigns (Watt & Minton: 216).

However it is no easy task to bring together the power of numerous campaigns into a cohesive movement that does not lose the voices of its individual member groups. Radical Housing Network organiser Jacob Wills articulates this dilemma when he writes:

The localised nature of the housing movement gives it endurance as people fight in their direct self-interest. But the connective structures between local groups, whether on a city-wide or continental scale, also need to amplify struggles, to make a coalition more

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than the sum of its parts. The creation of fluid democratic strategy in these scenarios has never been resolved by political parties, trade unions, NGOs, or most social movements. (Wills 2016: 292).

This is one of three questions to be answered in the case analysis: How can a local campaign broaden its message and influence beyond the borough? Wills raises the question of what to do once community power is harnessed, particularly in its relation to political power: ‘for many campaigners who have limited experience of either consistent grassroots power or its relation to political power, making one serve the other is a new challenge’ (292). He acknowledges the need for political allies to reach the heads of power but also warns against reliance on political networks. He argues that what is at issue in these campaigns is not just how to build power but also who builds it. In this sense it is important that social change is led by strong communities not by political policy. And so he warns somewhat paradoxically that ‘in trying to pull politicians towards our communities and their needs we have to remember to stay away from them’ (ibid: 295). Given that the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, shares many of the concerns and socialist-based demands of London’s housing activists, the question of how to navigate that relationship between grassroots power and political elites is more pertinent than ever. The second question for analysis then is how does the campaign engage with a political party and still ground itself in the effected community?

For the relationship between movements and political parties to work it needs to be mutually and equally beneficial, something Wills is not optimistic about. The history of London’s housing activism has shown, he feels, that these relationships are usually too weak to reach a stage where both the campaign and the politicians work together rather than in their own interests and that whereas the success of the movement will always strengthen a politicians hand, the success of a politician is not always beneficial for the movement. This history has left activists wary of political allegiances. ‘We have spent so long out in the cold we have forgotten how to structure these relationships, recoiling instead at the prospect either of making demands we cannot follow through on and demonstrating our weakness, or wasting our time with lying rhetoricians (Wills: 295). Analysis will explore how the campaign used politics as a tool without being used by political parties itself.

In 2016 Wills warned that ‘it would be foolish to suggest that London’s housing movement is strong enough to demand to be consulted on party political strategy’ (294). And yet the Stop- HDV campaign, while not a voice of a city-wide movement, has managed exactly that. Activism has, in the past, focused on opposing the political system through demonstrations and

20 challenging it through court cases. Never has activism attempted to reform that system from the inside by directly engaging politics and triggering the kind of deselection process seen in Haringey.

3. Defining Stop-HDV as a social movement

This section will establish that the Stop-HDV campaign may be considered a social movement and therefore subject to social movement theory. It will also outline the particular challenges faced by a movement campaigning on this type of issue.

While individual actors or groups within the campaign may be viewed as part of civil society, the anti-HDV campaign as a whole is more accurately described as a movement. While studies of civil society organisations ‘often focus on non- or less-contentious forms of collective action that give priority to largely consensual issues and agendas’, social movements are considered more ‘confrontational’, ‘disruptive’ and generally centre around a clear conflict as is the case in Haringey (Della Porta & Diani, 2012: 3). What Stop-HDV has done in its court battle and deselection of pro-HDV councillors is in line with Della Porta and Diani’s definition of social movements:

Social movement actors are engaged in political and/or cultural conflicts, meant to promote or oppose social change. By conflict we mean an oppositional relationship between actors who seek control of the same stake—be it political, economic, or cultural power – and in the process make negative claims on each other—i.e., demands which, if realized, would damage the interests of the other actors. (2012: 3)

Here the social change opposed is the privatisation of social housing services. The stake Stop- HDV is seeking to control is the reigns of public policy via the council. And the negative claims made involve the demonising of pro-HDV councillors as anti-democratic neoliberals. Claims which, when realised, damaged the interests of those councillors who were deselected.

Diani defines social movements as ‘informal networks created by a multiplicity of individuals, groups, and organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts on the basis of a shared collective identity‘ (Della Porta & Diani, 2012: 2). The anti-HDV campaign is made up of a network of actors from various organisations and groupings with similar agendas revolving around social justice, local agency, democratic accountability and general (though not exclusive) left-wing political leanings. It is one cog in a machine of anti-privatisation/anti-

21 gentrification/housing-action campaigns throughout London. While these campaigns do not always explicitly coordinate they are fuelled by each other’s success and are emboldened by the same triggers such as the Grenfell Tower fire.

In support of this assessment, several of the leading activists spoke of the campaign in the context of a social movement. One with a locally focused as well as a broader national element:

[…] We think we have built a local social movement with some repercussions nationally as well as London wide […] I suppose it would be connecting with people in Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff who’ve got similar issues at stake and are talking about community protection and renewal rather than regeneration which has certainly become, let’s say, a toxic word […] but in my mind it is linked to the neoliberal agenda which had destroyed the social fabric of so much of what we know. […] So for me it’s linked, personally and politically with the end of austerity as a driver of national politics (Gordon Peters, Stop-HDV campaigner).

Establishing that the Stop-HDV campaign can be considered part of a social movement allows for the use of social movement theories to analyse this case.

4. Structural challenges to the anti-HDV movement

Drawing on a comprehensive review of contemporary social movement theories by Amenta et al (2010) it is clear that certain conditions make it particularly hard for social movements to realise their desired change:

‘[…] scholars of social movements have also found that certain issues and policies may be very difficult for movements to influence, including policies (a) closely tied to the national cleavage structure (b) for which high levels of political or material resources are at stake’ (Amenta, 2010: 295)

These two conditions are particularly relevant to the Haringey case: (a) It occurs in the context of historical and ongoing polarisation between the UK’s political left and right solidified by a first-past-the-post electoral system and more recently a split within the Labour party itself between socialists and neoliberals and (b) Significant material resources stand to be sold off to the profit of private enterprises. The Haringey case has resulted in political resources, namely council seats, coming under significant threat through deselection strategies. Paranoia around a ‘purge’ of the Labour Party by the Left was heightened by the coinciding ascension of Momentum leaders to the national executive of the Labour party. Understandably, ‘in these

22 policy areas, there are more likely to be powerful state and non-state actors working in opposition to the movement’ (ibid): in this case the local council and the developer Lend Lease. Unsurprisingly, such community opposition to government sponsored privatisation has been framed as a David and Goliath type battle.

Moreover the structure of local governance that has developed in the UK restricts the scope for community participation and state accountability. Amenta et al point to a third barrier to social movement gains where ‘in structurally unfavorable political contexts in which a group’s democratic rights are greatly restricted, influence over policy is extremely difficult to achieve’ (ibid). It is the premise of this thesis that such state structures ‘in which a group’s democratic rights are greatly restricted’ do not only refer to the restrictions of authoritarian regimes. Indeed this could equally be applied to the structure of local governance in the UK where, as outlined, decades of neoliberal central government policies have culminated in local councils that are neither fully democratic nor competitively political in nature, making it a challenge for citizens to influence central government policies that affect them at a local level.

5. Theoretical framework This section will explore the theory of political mediation in social movements: that a movement’s activity is mediated through its political context. It will then outline the theoretical basis of the networking and framing strategies applied by the campaign in reaction to this political context. Theories applied to this case are chosen on the grounds of empirical insights garnered from inductive field research.

5.1. Political mediation

The basis of political mediation theory is that a combination of specific movement strategies in the context of specific political conditions will lead that movement to have influence at a political level. i.e. that the collective action of a social movement is politically mediated.

Political mediation is a more nuanced development of the overarching theory from which it sprouted: political opportunity structure. Before political opportunity structure rose to dominate the field, social movement theorists focused on how movements mobilised (resource mobilisation theory), without taking into account contextual factors of influence such as political setting (Meyer 2004: 127). Political opportunity theory sought to correct this by arguing that the type and amount of a movement’s activity could be explained by the political context with which it was confronted. For instance one of the leading proponents of political opportunity, Doug McAdam tracked the success of the US civil rights movement through changes to electoral and legal politics. McAdams linked gains of the movement to ‘shifts in the

23 electoral constituencies of Democrats and Republicans as a result of migration of blacks to the northern states, and the erosion of the Democrats' hold on southern whites’ (Koopmans 2007: 6). He points to the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown v Board of Education which ended legal protection for segregated public schooling, as a source of legitimation for activists who then encouraged further similar cases, as well as a source of “cognitive liberation” for African Americans who were buoyed by the endorsement of their campaign. (Meyer: 129). While ‘the state can invite action by facilitating access, but it can also provoke action by producing unwanted policies and political threats, thereby raising the costs of inaction’ (Meyer: 131).

The main criticism of political opportunity structure is firstly, that it is too broad a framework to be applicable to numerous cases. Critics warned that it is ‘in danger of becoming a sponge that soaks up every aspect of the social movement environment’ (Meyer: 126). Secondly, it does not give enough, if any, credit to activists. Focusing on the political backdrop of a movement, it can often portray activists as passive observers, waiting for a change in fortune (Meyer: 126).

Political mediation theory arose out of the shortcomings of these earlier forms of social movement theory. In essence it argues that ‘specific movement strategies, activities, and forms in combination with specific political contexts will lead to influence for social movements’ (Amenta 2013: 1). In its specificity political mediation goes further than merely clocking political opportunities and in its acknowledgment of the combined importance of actors and opportunities it returns the agency to activists that was lacking in previous theory. It rejects the kind of silver bullet answers historically sought by social movement theories: that there is one magic factor that would make a movement influential. A political mediation approach looks at how some forms of mobilization and strategies would likely be productive in some contexts rather than others (ibid). It does not make the sweeping promises of political opportunity theory but is of greater value to emerging social campaigners to whom its specificity offers a more thorough guide. Introducing the change in tack Amenta et al explain that , ‘instead of asking whether movements are generally influential or whether certain aspects of movements are always influential, as others have done, we ask under what conditions are social movements likely to be influential’ (2005: 516, 517).

To summarise, in its most practical form political mediation theory highlights opportunities for activists offered by specific political contexts and outlines the effect of certain actions within those contexts. When discussing these actions taken by the campaign this paper will make use of theories of networking and framing. In preparation, these theories are introduced below.

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5.2. Strategic networking

The political context of the campaign mediates how its network of activists are brought together and how the message of the campaign is created and diffused via select political channels. This thesis is interested in the extent to which the anti-HDV campaign made use of networks, the nature of those networks i.e. are they political or not, and what issues might arise from that networking.

Co-ordination with a network of other actors allows organisations with individual grievances to engage strategically in a politics of scale (Levkoe, 2014: 175). That is, by connecting with other groups who share similar grievances organisations up-scale their platform and create a more powerful forum from which to demand more far reaching structural change in the interest of all members of the network. Why would a network of activists be desirable for a movement like stop HDV? As Krinsky and Crossley explain, ‘at the most basic level, members of aggrieved populations must communicate if they are to coordinate their efforts, pool their resources and act collectively’ (2014: 8). This applies to both the make-up of Stop-HDV itself and, on a bigger scale, to other such campaigns that it networks with.

When these aggrieved communities collaborate for collective gain ‘different patterns of connection between them will affect the ease with which such coordination is achieved, along with its efficiency/effectiveness’ (ibid). A group such as Stop-HDV has the option of engaging with non-political housing action networks, such as the Radical Housing Network, or connecting with networks drawn along political lines such as the Labour Party or Momentum. Its choice of networks will affect the nature and outcome of its campaign. While considerable work exists on political opportunity structures, there is less research conducted on the effect of movement alignment with political organisations themselves.

5.3. Framing

The political mediation of campaign strategies cannot be analysed without taking into account the frames that a network of activists construct for their campaign in reaction to the political environment around them.

Here framing is understood as defined by McAdam and Snow:

Framing in the context of social movements refers to the signifying work or meaning construction engaged in by movement adherents (e.g., leaders activists, and rank and file participants) and other actors (e.g., adversaries, institutional

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elites, media, counter movements) relevant to the interests of movements and the challenges they mount in pursuit of those interests. (2010: 317).

For example, the campaign’s demand for ballots on affected estates is not only practically desirable but also creates a frame through which to view events in which Stop-HDV is on the side of democracy, legitimacy and fairness and the council is not. Such action requires an awareness of the frames created by the council’s action so as to counter it with an appropriately powerful frame. If the council’s lack of legitimate consultation with residents makes this an issue of democracy then an attentive campaign shapes its actions and demands around increasing democracy.

The central idea of political mediation and political opportunity structure is that ‘circumstances in the broader cultural and political context will moderate the influence of collective action frames on political outcomes’ (McCammon et al., 2007: 731) and that in order to successfully oppose an undesirable state of affairs, ‘challengers need to match collective action strategies to political contexts’ (Amenta et al 2005: 532). While there are of course other factors at play in the success or failure of a campaign, contemporary work on social movement theory is in agreement that movement mobilisation cannot be analysed independently of these surrounding political opportunities structures because different uses of different frames in different political opportunity structures will have certain effects.

Because the movement must react to different opportunity structures with different frames it must be clever about how to best make use of its network of activists. As the Stop-HDV campaign has worked to (re)politise and (re)democratise the local community on the one hand, and influence national housing policy on the other it has engaged in three levels of activism: mobilisation and protest, legal challenges, and the deselection of councillors. As Amenta et al point out ‘SMO leaders must find ways to alter their mobilization frames in addressing political decision makers or courts, or they must cede control over these processes to other SMOs or like- minded policy makers’ (2005: 297). That is, Stop-HDV must be able to either switch between their role as community mobilisers and political campaigners, or else outsource the job of ‘doing politics’ to an appropriate branch of the network such as the Labour group.

5.4. Linking theories

The process of framing or ‘meaning making’ ‘does not occur in a structural or cultural vacuum. Rather, framing processes are affected by a number of elements of the socio-cultural context in which they are embedded’ one of them being the political climate the campaign finds itself in. (Benford and Snow 2000: 628).

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Likewise the relationship between framing and networks is one of mutual dependence. ‘Networks provide the channels whereby movement frames, repertoires, and sometimes even triggers are diffused beyond instigators to a wider population of potential participants’ (Krinsky and Crossley 2014: 4) The network then works to distribute the campaign message as framed in a process shaped by its activists.

To summaries, a campaign emerges in a certain political context. That context determines much of what the campaign can achieve. But the campaign can wield a degree of power within that space by shaping its demands and activities to fit the political climate. It does this through a process of framing: packaging its demands and identity in the most effective way possible to achieve its aims. These frames are created and continuously honed by the members of the campaign and its allies who are themselves attracted by the meaning the campaign has made of the issue. This paper will analyse the framing strategies used by the Stop-HDV campaign to take advantage of the current political context of a rejuvenated Left in Britain and how those strategies were deployed via its political and community networks.

6. Research design.

6.1. Why a case study?

There are several reasons for conducting this research via a case study. In relation to this topic specifically, findings must be understood in the context of individual cases and cannot be blindly forced onto all similar campaigns in the expectation that the same tactics will prove fruitful. Such a one-size-fits-all framework would ignore the demand of political mediation for nuanced analysis. As Amenta et al point out:

[…] political mediation arguments reject the search for magic bullets: There are no specific organizational forms, strategies, or political contexts that will always help challengers. Instead, scholars should be looking for specific forms of organization and strategies that are more productive in some political contexts than in others’ (2010: 296).

Looking at successful community organisation means analysing proven forms of organisation and strategies so that lessons can be extracted by future campaigns. But taking a specific case means those lessons come with the benefit of a complete picture so that attempts are not made to ‘copy and paste’ solutions from one campaign to another with no regard for circumstance. If it

27 is the purpose of this research to educational resource for other campaigns to gain expertise then it must consider Flyvbjerg’s advice:

Context-dependent knowledge and experience are at the very heart of expert activity. Such knowledge and expertise also lie at the center of the case study as a research and teaching method or to put it more generally still, as a method of learning […] It is only because of experience with cases that one can at all move from being a beginner to being an expert. If people were exclusively trained in context-independent knowledge and rules, that is, the kind of knowledge that forms the basis of textbooks and computers, they would remain at the beginner’s level in the learning process (Flyvbjerg 2006: 222).

The case study method was chosen with the aim of producing the kind of ‘thick description’ valued by qualitative researchers for its richness and detail. As referenced by Bryman, ‘Lincoln and Guba argue that a thick description provides others with what they refer to as a database for making judgements about the possible transferability of findings to other milieux’ (Bryman 2012: 392).

Secondly, out of respect to the individuality of community grievances and the unique nature of grassroots mobilisation it is apt that this research is conducted via a specific case study. To investigate opposition to regeneration projects without a focus on the voices of the affected community would not only lack legitimacy but would perpetuate the very system at issue in which those individuals felt excluded.

6.2. Why this case?

This case was chosen due to its success in the face of considerable odds, the unprecedented scale of the proposed development, and political and social context in which it unfolded.

It is an ongoing case of successful community opposition to the development of private units on the site of existing social housing in Haringey. Under pressure from a sustained community campaign Haringey Council is in the process of reversing its support for a partnership with private developer Lend Lease called the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV). The proposal aimed to demolish existing social housing and replace it with 6,400 new homes and community amenities. The project would have been the largest public-private partnership of its kind in the history of the UK.

The Haringey case is a working component of a larger system of neoliberal governance in the UK (and globally) and the difficulties faced by civil society groups who oppose it in cases where

28 the system works explicitly against their perceived interests at the same time as it excludes their voice. The case has become symbolic of an ongoing debate regarding the nature of democracy and legitimate representation and comes at a time of heightened social awareness about social housing in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, an ideological divide within the UK Labour Party, and a public reassessment of the feasibility of private outsourcing of services following the collapse of construction giant Carillion which ran large swathes of the UK’s public services.

Haringey has a history of allegations of excessive police force and a ‘troubled’ local council which was found severely lacking in the wake of several highly publicised cases of child abuse. Against the backdrop of severe budget cuts to local councils throughout the UK, in 2009 Haringey council’s performance was ranked by an audit commission as the worst in London and the fourth worst in the country. Demographically the borough is one of extremes in that it includes some of the most prosperous neighbourhoods in the country alongside some of the most deprived. It is ethnically mixed and has a high proportion of single parent households. Though this conflict between the community, the council and private business occurs on a structural and cultural level there is a history of social tensions spilling over into violent confrontation as witnessed in the 2011 London riots which indeed began in Tottenham.

Most interestingly, this case is valuable to other camapaigns as an example of successful social activism in a city increasingly restricted by the forces of state sponsored privatisation. It is a case of local activism punching above its weight to overturn the council’s plan but also to draw the attention of national politics and media and fuel a wider debate regarding local agency in the city’s development.

It is of increasing relevance considering the sheer scale of privatisation ongoing in London, the city’s housing and rental crisis, and the growing pressure to make the city more attractive to international investment in the wake of Brexit. The case of Haringey is in many ways the ideal example of a trend occurring throughout London.

For those who would criticise ‘yet another case study of community mobilisation in the face of big business’ the simple answer is ‘this one worked’.

6.3. Research method: interviews and observation

Field research was conducted over a month spent living in Tottenham in the Borough of Haringey, North London. Data was collected via interviews with Stop-HDV campaigners, Momentum members, members of the Labour Party, members of other political parties and

29 none, tenants of the affected estates and private home owners in the area. A full list and description of interviewees is available at the beginning of this thesis.

Original interview requests were made on the basis of which groups or individuals were frequently mentioned in media reportage and on the website of the campaign group. Gathering interviews thereafter relied on a chain referral or ‘snowball’ effect whereby each interviewee was made aware of who had been interviewed already and asked for their suggestions on who else should be included until no new names arose4. A similar approach was taken to interviews themselves for which a basic set of questions was originally prepared. Thereafter issues raised by one activist prompted the questions for the next interviewee and so on. In this way the campaign was forced to question and answer to itself. The result is a series of individual interviews that represent a collective reflection on the campaign of the members by the members. As the interviewees were asked many of the same questions and their comments were often put to each other, it was as if they had come together in one room to tell a collective story, complementing and contradicting one another, building on each other’s opinions. And yet the advantage remained of meeting each individually and without the interruption that such a communal interview would entail in real terms.

Interviews were semi structured in format. A set of questions was prepared and put to each interviewee with minor alterations or additions based on their political and community affiliations. For example each interviewee was asked how they came to hear about the HDV project and how they became involved in the Stop-HDV campaign. In this way a story of the birth and structure of the campaign was formed. In this sense interviews were ‘structured’ in style. However they were semi-structured in the sense that interviewees were also given significant scope to diverge from questions and raise topics of concern, with interviews regularly surpassing two hours. In her extensive outline of this style of interviewing Gallette notes that ‘characteristic of its unique flexibility, the semi-structured interview is sufficiently structured to address specific dimensions of your research question while also leaving space for study participants to offer new meanings to the topic of study’ (Galletta 2013: 2). The benefit of this flexibility was twofold. In the space they were given interviewees recognised that I had a genuine interest in and respect for their story in all its complexity, something of particular importance for trust building given the often simplified narrative of the case portrayed by the media. Secondly the surrounding detail of the borough, its previous campaigns and ongoing issues meant that the data I gathered was supported by a deep understanding of its context. It

4 Not all names suggested were then interviewed. In several instances time constraints prohibited more interviews. Though several councillors and Labour party members were suggested the timing of field research in the period leading up to the May local elections meant that these individuals were not available for interview.

30 also gave me greater credence in the eyes of the interviewees who could see that I had a decent grasp of their local political and community setting.

While the bulk of this research was conducted via interviews some time was given to observation at several community events and in one instance, a meeting of the London Radical Housing Network. These meetings offered a kind of data that, while not always relevant to my research question, was richly organic by virtue of the fact that it was not a formally structured interview. Participants spoke their minds on the issues that affected them in their own setting, perhaps the closest a researcher can come to gathering data without influencing and compromising it. It also provided fuel for and authenticity to later interview questions which were grounded in the reality of local concerns rather than devised from detached academic theory. In one instance a debate arose on the ‘uncaring middle-classes’ that arose during a community forum which I attended. The fact that it was raised by the community themselves allowed me to later reference this debate with interviewees and question the issue of class division within the Stop-HDV campaign. It provided a Segway into the somewhat sensitive topic of class and a means of cross-checking or triangulating the information garnered from these observations.

6.4. Ethics and limitations.

One of the main limitation of this research concerns issues of legitimacy in community representation: how representative are these community leaders or grassroots activists that were interviewed? Prior to field research preliminary contact with ‘locals’ prompted one response from a member of Stop-HDV and Momentum ‘I am also a social housing tenant so I actually know what it is like to live in social housing unlike many involved in the campaign’. Though research found that several of the campaign’s core members were in fact social housing tenants, attempts were made to counter balance any dominance of the campaign’s leadership by speaking with unaffiliated community members and hearing from those most affected such as those resident in the social housing in question. However I acknowledge that this is an unending issue worthy of constant consideration and that by its nature is never and should never be fully concluded.

When interview subjects are gathered through the above mentioned snowball effect there is a risk that a disproportionate number of interviewees may be affiliates of particular group with a particular agenda. In this instance interviewees are by necessity affiliated with the Stop-HDV campaign while membership of other groups is useful data for the analysis of the way in which

31 the campaign networks. Any affiliations the members have outside of Stop-HDV are listed above.

Ethical concerns and consideration of this research project have been assembled in consultation with the ethics guidelines of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Considering the nature of the conflict as one of power imbalance between the state and those who rely on its services, care was taken to insure that residents did not see me as someone who is in anyway related to their case or has any impact on their desired result. The need for extra sensitivity in the case of residents who may be availing of social housing because they belong to a vulnerable or marginalised group was recognised throughout the research.

In comparing and contrasting the answers of interviewees within Stop-HDV, particularly those of different political affiliations, care was taken to ensure that I was not the cause of any discord between them and that information was not divulged from one to the other that they would not wish to be shared.

I am aware that in documenting the ‘inside story’ of the Stop-HDV campaign I am making public information that could be used by local government officials who may seek to undermine such campaigns in the future. Participants were made fully aware of the public nature of this research. It was then at the discretion of interviewees, in their full awareness that this research will be publically available, to ask to omit anything they may consider too sensitive to disclose.

Throughout fieldwork I followed my own interest and sought to answer my own research question. Yet I remained mindful of mapping my interests and concerns onto those of the research subjects and in doing so manipulating their story into the one I wanted to hear. During that period and in the writing of this paper I sought to respect the reality of the situation without dilution or divergence for the sake of academic argument. My research angle must be drawn from but not interfere with the reality of the subjects’ lived experience and concerns.

Finally I undertake this thesis in the hope that it proves ethical in its aim to serve a social purpose beyond pure academic speculation and avoid in so far as possible what Schön refers to as ‘the hierarchical separation of research and practice’ (1983: 26): at the very least by listening to those who have long been underrepresented and potentially by contributing to a guiding framework from which future movements aiming to amplify such voices can draw.

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7. Introduction to case. As a preface to the analysis of the campaign, this section offers an overview of the case which has been compiled from a series of interviews conducted with activists and residents of the borough. It then outlines some of the case-specific barriers faced the campaign and outlines the context by which the campaign found itself on the political route to achieving its goals. In the below introduction and in the proceeding analysis it is intended in so far as possible to bring the voices of the campaigners themselves to the fore with minimal editorial interference. This is done for the purpose of accuracy and also in the awareness that in such projects the voices of affected communities are often side-lined. What follows is a story of how a community campaign effectively engaged with politics to succeed against the odds.

7.1. Activist’s description of case.

Opposition to the HDV project.

I didn’t like the way the Labour council here was going along with the austerity policy you know. Almost with a vengeance. Saying ‘we’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll offload whatever we have to offload’. […] And the poorest people in the borough were really suffering by that. And then I talked to a number of people around in the Labour party, in the Green Party, in the council who were sceptical of the leader’s agenda. It was a very, you know in political terms, a very right wing Labour council basically […] And we were fighting this battle basically on the whole austerity agenda and what it was actually doing locally, when I came across something. I think it was Phil Jackson [later a leading Stop-HDV campaigner] in fact sent me ‘two billion pound gamble’ and he said you should have more of a look at this […] And it discovered that in fact the procurement process for the Haringey Development Vehicle was perhaps one of the biggest sell offs – that was ‘2 billion pound Gamble’ – that had ever been attempted by local authorities in Britain.

I was fairly horrified to find that it involved in three tranches basically what HDV is about: the transfer of all physical property and assets belonging to the borough to a new private vehicle in which they will have a 50/50 stake […] The first was the big estates like Northumberland Park in Tottenham and all the council property here where we’re sitting in Wood Green - the civic headquarters and the library next door - to be demolished and to be reprovided by thousands of new houses on the basis of which they would get some benefit back to the borough and profit basically for anything they still wanted to do. Then there was a second tranche which

33 included Broadwater Farm, a very well-known estate which figured in the Tottenham riots in the past [...] And then a third tranche of anything else which was I think the words were ‘insufficiently used’ or surplus to requirements. Transfered into this vehicle. (Gordon Peters).

The more and more you privatise housing, the worse the housing crisis has got. So that’s one reason we’re opposed to it. The other thing is that practically it’s a nightmare, even if you could allow for privatising of housing, putting so many of Haringey’s assets into one company is just…is just moronic. […] It went bust in Cumbridge Wells, it went bust in Croydon. […]. Experience tells you this is what happens. And yet they think that’s a good idea: putting all your assets into a private company. […] They put all their assets in, Lend lease put a loan note in. So it goes bust. Lend Lease say ‘oh no, we owe a loan note. Oh well, we’re a limited liability company. We don’t need to pay that’. And Haringey say ‘we’re protected by limited liability’. Well yes you won’t have to pay that debt back but you have lost £2billion of your assets along the way. And so you’re never going to replace them. And then a private company who then picks up all the assets, picks up all the debt, well they’ve got all those assets.

And there is a third reason […] after the Tottenham riots Boris Johnson [then Mayor of London] said, ‘I don’t want to see another riot in Tottenham and I’m going to take Haringey into the control of the mayor of London’. And Claire Kober [then Labour head of Haringey Council] said ‘don’t worry there won’t be another riot in Haringey we’ll make sure of it’. (Phil Rose)

[…] Basically since the riots in Tottenham the local council have been trying to look at some way of, they would say ‘regenerating’ the area, others would say replacing the existing population of the area with a more amenable population that wasn’t going to riot. […] Eventually they came up with this idea of this local development vehicle, basically giving council property to a private company set up jointly with a big developer and that became the HDV.

Yeah that’s where they really started trying to change the nature of the East of the borough, the Tottenham side of Haringey. And implicit in that, if you look at the documents is effectively, they talk about a more diverse and a more mixed community but actually there’s an incredibly diverse and mixed community. What they mean is bringing in wealthy components to the community and getting rid of

34 people who can’t afford to live in an effectively privatised community. (Doug Thorpe)

You say where do we across London unify? And this is where. This is the point of meeting right: social cleansing. Basically, property prices in London are soaring right. More and more you see rich people coming in, buying up properties. There are not enough properties for the poor people. As you create more and more poverty you see more and more homelessness. You have a nasty, scruffy, untidy city. And what are you going to do with these poor people? Well you can’t house them because you’ve got rid of housing because you’re not building any public housing […] And we need to do something about them. We have a problem of rioters, we have a problem of poverty, we have a problem of all these people untidying our public area. So we’ll just get them out. We won’t deal with the problems. We won’t actually provide anything for them. We’ll just ship them off to some other poor area where they can all live together in this big hovel. And that’s a pretty crude way of putting it but that’s essentially what they’re saying.

They deny they’re saying it but it’s not just here that they’re doing it. They’re doing it across London. They’re doing it in Southwark, they’re doing it in Lambeth […] They’re basically getting poor people out of London. Because poor people are the inconvenience of London. […] Where are they going to get their waiters, their cleaners, their builders, their policemen, their nurses, their doctors, their teachers? Where are they going to get these people from if they’ve shipped everyone out?

[…] West Green road [in Tottenham] isn’t pretty. But it is a very vibrant area with people from different races and backgrounds living side by side. In harmony. And this is what this area is. This is what Tottenham is. It is a slum. But it’s our slum! And it’s for poor people. […] You know they want to make it look nice and pristine and the same as Cumbridge Wells, the same as Reading, the same as any other, you know, wealthy area. And they forget that sometimes you want to have areas that are different. Sometimes you want to have areas where people actually just live and create their own area. And that’s what this part of London is like. (Phil Rose)

Tottenham was probably the cheapest place in London to buy. So that was the 80s. Riot city. Well you know I’ve witnessed riots all around. And lots of lefties moved to places like Tottenham […] So a lot of the driving force of campaigns like Stop-HDV are some of the old guard who came here in the ‘80s. Who liked the fact that it’s very multicultural, who liked the fact that it’s a bit edgy. […] And liked the fact that

35 our kids go to very diverse schools etc. etc. and meet with kids from all over the world, from council estates etc. etc. The last five years I’d say, Tottenham’s demographic has changed quite dramatically. It’s changing as people can’t afford to live here anymore. My kids can’t afford to live here. They’ve had to move. They’re never going to live here. Unless I die and they get my house. I mean that’s the only way it’s going to happen.

[…] The demographic is changing. So part of the campaign against social cleansing isn’t just about people on the estates, working class people and Black people or whatever, Turks and Kurds or whatever. It’s also about a lot of people who’ve been around a long, long time who value what Tottenham is. (Simon Hester, SWP)

[…] it’s what’s happening across London. I mean you go into town. You go to the South Bank or go to the where I was last night, Hackney Wick by the Olympics [stadium]. And you’re just overcome by the scale of new construction. It really hits you. […] The size, the overwhelmingness and the dehumanisation […] But the scale of what’s going up and up and up and the fact that most of these houses are speculative and owned by foreign or UK rich people and will never be lived in by people on average earnings or below is ultimately scandalous and it’s across London. So it think that for me is a big thing because I live in Haringey and I see what I can do here and relate it to the rest. (Gordon Peters)

Origins of the Stop-HDV campaign.

It wasn’t as the press would have you believe, some sort of Momentum led conspiracy. In fact if John Lansman [leader of national Momentum] and the Momentum leadership had come anywhere near us at the start they would have told us not to do it probably because it was implicitly critical of the Labour council […] They weren’t very keen on rocking the boat too much. And also they wanted to focus it more on doing stuff within the Labour Party than outside. Actually part of the provocation did come from a Momentum meeting. There was a Momentum meeting where it was discussed and the meeting as a whole accepted a motion from one of the Left councillors basically not to go campaign publically on this but to just leave it to the left councillors to sort it out and a couple of people just walked out of that meeting and thought ‘no we’ve got to do something’, made contact with Defend Council Housing people and Stop-HDV was born. (Doug Thorpe).

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[…] basically they said ‘we don’t want you to do anything. We want you to write to your councillors and leave it to us’. And several of us said ‘no we need to do something. We can’t just sit and leave it to people to do it. We have to take control of this’[…] this is stupid. Basically you want me to just sit there and take it’. So I said ‘fuck this, I’m off’ (Phil Rose).

I think it’s a bit of shame that it ended up not being run through Momentum but I understand why it was. So at that meeting […] we said ‘okay we should organise a demo, organise a lobby.’ And a couple of the councillors […] were very kind of edgy about that. […] the councillors stood up and said ‘you can’t. You’ve got to be very careful. Look, we know what we’re doing. You can’t scare people. There are Labour councillors who might vote against this if we’re very, very careful with them.’ And we’re like ‘no, this is ridiculous, thousands of people are going to lose their homes. This is not a case for kind of playing nicely nicely with some councillors who might just about change their minds. We’ve got to make them change their minds by showing them what we’re capable of doing’.

And it kind of descended into chaos and that wasn’t agreed. Which is why people like Phil Jackson decided they were going to go and set up a new group of people. And I think that’s a shame because I think they should have stayed and fought with those of us who wanted to make Momentum a tool for not just what the councillors wanted us to do but to have its own decisions. But in some ways if they hadn’t gone off and done their own thing it wouldn’t have happened. (Gemma Short, Secretary Haringey Momentum).

Deselecting councillors as a new campaign tactic.

There were people who would have wanted to reselect councillors anyway and then there were people who were just so fed up with the HDV thing. But they tended to be people who by that stage had already been going to the Stop-HDV. So they would have been Labour Party members primarily but they would also have been members of the campaign. The two had already meshed before the decision was taken about the reselection thing (Doug Thorpe).

That hadn’t been tried in that way in London. I’m not saying there haven’t been campaigns that have had a Labour Party focus in the past or had Labour Party activists but their campaigning has tended to be the traditional street campaigning, petitions stuff. Using this part of the political process to transform the candidates

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that were going to be selected: I don’t think that’s happened before. Or not recently. Maybe 20 odd years ago in Liverpool or somewhere like that. […] But not since Thatcher and Blaire has this happened I don’t think in London. (Doug Thorpe).

Topic of national debate.

There was lots of stuff on Twitter and everything else about ‘left-agitators trying to take over’. But my view from the outside because I’m not in the Labour party, was that it was much more democratic than what had happened before. Because they were asking for these existing incumbents to justify themselves. And some, quite a few of them, including [Alan] Strickland, the lead member for housing, actually stood down before he was deselected because he could see what was likely to happen (Gordon Peters).

Kober [then leader of the council] was still for a while…she was still saying ‘we’re going ahead anyway’. The legal case wasn’t yet out. They were issuing more and more, in her case very deterministic, hard-line statements about ‘this was the only way in which Haringey could ever be improved. Everybody else is living in cloud cuckoo land’ and things like that. But then, by that time, the configuration of politics within the ward was so clearly changed to such an extent that the old guard around Kober had lost out dramatically […] Anyway she then made the resignation statement (Gordon Peters).

Yeah it was a very strange time. You’d just turn on the TV every night and the London news and paper had Haringey in it. Stuff that we’d been doing for a year and trying to stop this happening has suddenly become national news. (Gemma Short)

We got the media attention and the media, since then, have clearly seen Haringey as the litmus test for regeneration (Gordon Peters).

7.2. Barriers to the campaign outlined

If Haringey is indeed a ‘litmus test for regeneration’ it is also an indicator of how a community can successfully halt such projects when they are not in their perceived interest. Many of the barriers to such community participation in local democracy (demunicipalisation, budget cuts, ideological withdrawal of the state from local government etc.) have been outlined under ‘structural challenges to the HDV movement’ and detailed in the background literature to this topic. The below analysis focuses specifically on the case of Haringey. It recognises the presence

38 of the aforementioned barriers and seeks to clarify additional barriers as outlined by the borough’s own activists so as to explain the context for the campaigns unexpected success.

In explaining political mediation, Amenta et al distinguish between a ‘highly democratized polity’ and an ‘underdemocractized polity’. The first involves a ‘meaningful choices among parties or factions’. The second involves elections but with ‘great restrictions on political participation’, dampening the impact of a movement’s collective action (2005: 520). In an underdemocratized polity there are ‘noncompetitive elections and formal and informal restrictions on voting, such as poll taxes, extensive eligibility tests, harassment, and violence’ (ibid). The Haringey case belongs somewhere in the middle of these two scenarios. Certainly it is not underdemocratised to the point where voters experience restrictions such eligibility tests or violence. But neither is it highly democratic to the extent that voters enjoy a ‘meaningful choice among parties’. Indeed one of the greatest issues exposed by this case is the previously ‘noncompetitive’ (ibid) nature of elections in the borough where the right wing of Labour was, until now, so dominant as to never warrant a reselection process; the sitting councillors acting more as implementers of central government policy than as ideologically driven, political agents.

[…] the influence of the Right on the Labour Party over the last 20 years has been to… so the whole conception, the Blairite conception of like ‘what Labour does is like effectively manage things and we’ve got to be seen to be efficient administrators and we’re not trouble makers and we don’t cause trouble and whatever’. […] That sort of idea that what Labour councils should be is like effective administrators […] and that they shouldn’t be trying to fight on behalf of working class people, with working class people (Gemma Short).

[…] it should be a normal democratic process that the council don’t automatically get their seats and that we should be able to […] hold them to account if we think they’re wrong. And it is the case that the majority of people in Haringey feel like this is a ridiculous plan. Especially people who are directly affected on places like Northumberland Park estate (Gemma Short)

I don’t think they saw it coming. I think they’re very complacent and they just thought that ‘well Haringey. We always get voted in. Labour Party. You know, no one’s going to vote for anything else’. (Alison Davey)

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[…] the other thing is even before you get to that [triggering reselections] they have to decide who can put themselves forward as candidates and there’s a panel that is heavily weighted towards the existing councillors who are on it. […] there were a certain number of people who were kept off that list. So it’s actually trying to get people who are opposed to the HDV onto the panel that are allowed to be selected from. […] The existing Labour Party constitution is very heavily stacked in favour of existing councillors just being reselected basically (Doug Thorpe)

In her discussion of a ‘ladder of citizen participation’ Sherry Arnstein incisively articulates a community’s sense of exclusion from a tokenistic system of consultation, explaining simply that ‘there is a critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process’. To express this frustration she points to a poster created by French students in 1968 for the student-worker rebellion. ‘The poster highlights the fundamental point that participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It allows the powerholders to claim that all sides were considered, but makes it possible for only some of those sides to benefit. It maintains the status quo’ (Arnstein 1969).

[‘I participate, you participate, he participates, we participate, you participate, they profit’ (source Arnstein 1969)].

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A mould had long been set within Haringey and inside its Labour Party. Not only was the party guaranteed a majority of seats in the borough, the sitting Labour councillors were traditionally guaranteed their nominations come election time. Adding to this was the cabinet structure of the council which restricted ongoing, meaningful political participation of locals as it consolidated power and information among a small number of councillors with a place at the cabinet table.

People just began to realise how undemocratic this thing was […] I mean apart from the democracy of not telling the tenants and residents of the estates that you were going to sell off or hand over what was happening to them, actually people began to realise that they don’t have a role in this. The whole thing was being driven by the cabinet [...] And you get the ludicrous situation recently where we had a council meeting where basically the meeting was told that it doesn’t matter what the council decides because this decision has been made by the cabinet and the council cannot overturn a cabinet decision. (Doug Thorpe).

Amenta et al find that if the regime, in this case the council, ‘is opposed to the challenger or sees no benefit in adding the challenger’s beneficiary group to its coalition […] the sorts of limited protest [pickets, occupying representatives officers etc.] are likely to be ignored or to have a negligible effect’ (2005: 521).

[…] up to a certain point protests weren’t working, the council were very kind of entrenched. You could see by reading that Claire Kober [then council leader] stuff in the press that she was very, very kind of ‘I’m not changing my mind. People don’t get a say on this’. Things were only really decided by the cabinet rather than the Labour group (Gemma Short)

I referred to it as the slow motion avalanche of Haringey. We’d go to a meeting of the council and argue, the deputation you know they ask us questions, we argue back, we have this shouting, you know. There’s another and come back again and every time the slow motion avalanche is coming. There’s no way to stop it because it’s an avalanche. And in a sense we’re saying well we don’t have a way to stop it but we’re not going to give up. And in a sense a strategy emerges (Paul Burnham).

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7.3. Politics as a strategy: Engaging political opportunities.

Faced with these challenging political circumstances, this ‘slow motion avalanche’, Stop-HDV was forced as Amenta et al predicted to employ more ‘assertive’ collective action (2005: 521). Here the author’s take ‘assertive’ to mean ‘the use of increasingly strong political sanctions— those that threaten to increase or decrease the likelihood of political actors gaining or keeping something they see as valuable (their positions, acting in accordance with their beliefs) or to take over their functions or prerogatives’. They rightly point out that ‘sustained political action to unseat a representative, for example, would be more threatening than, say, dispatching protesters to picket or to occupy the representative’s office’. The Stop-HDV campaign had already taken a judicial review against the project and organised multiple demonstrations. When it became clear that this alone was not enough the campaign targeted the Labour Party itself. More assertive collective action took the form of deselecting Labour Councillors in the May 2018 local elections.

It became an almost inevitable thing: ‘what do we do? How do we get rid of these people?’. ‘Well here’s this process, let’s just try and use it’ (Doug Thorpe).

The first dimension was the law, the second dimension was the political side, the Labour Party side. And it was very much about the Labour Party. We can’t ignore this is a Labour council. […] If you ignore the Labour Party you give up your right to influence them. (Phil Rose).

We’ve been talking about stop the HDV all this time and you’re not listening. You’re not taking any notice of us. What’re we going to do? The natural thing to do is to deselect people […] I think that was a big shock. It was great. (Alison Davey)

Campaigns hoping to learn from Stop-HDV cannot always expect to take advantage of similar political scenarios because not all campaigns will come to fruition in an election year. However, the threat of deselections as a powerful tactic is something to be considered by London’s housing movement and by boroughs throughout the UK, many of which hold partial elections on an annual basis.

It’s going to difficult in London because the way in which the local government elections work in London is that just every four years the whole council’s re-elected. But in most of the rest of the country a proportion of the council is re-elected each year so actually in other parts of the country it could become a more generalised lesson. You wouldn’t be able to do quite the same overhaul because if only a third of

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the seats are up for election each year you’re only going to be at most able to replace…But it could become part of an ongoing strategy. As one element of it.

[…] When you say generalise a new tactic, you don’t necessarily want people to think that is the only way forward but it’s just to think about utilising it when it becomes possible to do so. And of course, probably, maybe it won’t be for four years but at some point there’ll be a general election as well and then you’ve got the question of the pressure that can be put on (Doug Thorpe).

What the Stop-HDV campaign managed in Haringey was a shock even to its members and a rare success story to be analysed by other London groups fighting similar issues against high odds.

The fact that we’ve won is still when you think about it quite staggering. It is quite staggering. We have deposed the right wing leadership of a key council and a key player in the Labour Party (Simon Hester).

I never thought deselections were going to happen. Obviously it’s not our terrain. […] It’s internal Labour Party stuff. But they did it. You know. Hugely important because what we’re also doing is fucking up the industry. Because the industry, the property development industry has this whole thing about going to Cannes in the South of France, smoozing council leaders and they’re very politically aware. They know if you want to get something through in Newham you sell it to the Labour Party because the Labour Party’s got all the seats on the council and the same is true in Haringey and basically you can’t go wrong. […] Look at the dominance of the Labour Party in Haringey politics: developers have got nothing to worry about. It’s bound to…You know. Unless it’s gone wrong (Paul Burnham).

. We knew that we could deselect people. We knew some of them would go. We thought we might get rid of 5 or 6 of them. The fact that we got rid of 20 took us by surprise […] My best hope was that we switch about 8 so that we can vote down the HDV. […] And we did 20 […] We obviously underestimated how much influence we were having (Phil Rose).

[…] most of the people that live in these Labour dominated boroughs feel that their leaders have been doing things which sound horrifyingly pro-business and against their own interests and how do we stop them? And up until now, including at the current selections, they haven’t seem to have been able to. So this is the first time – I’m saying this as an outsider to the Labour party- but it is the first time where it’s

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been demonstrated that you can change your own Labour Party power base from community action (Gordon Peters).

It’s not just kind of common sense everywhere that all the people who were against the HDV just suddenly said we’re going to do this. There was a political concept going on (Gemma Short).

7.4. Summary.

The campaign’s engagement with that ‘political concept’ arose out of the community’s frustration with the underdemocratic, Labour dominated council, the monopoly of the existing right-wing councillors within the party, and the concentration of power at cabinet level that allowed a project such as the HDV to be pushed ahead in the face of public protest. Confronted with these barriers the campaign imposed the most assertive political sanctions at its disposal: removing the unrepresentative councillors from their positions. The following chapters examine the process by which the campaign made effective use of the political system to disrupt the status quo within the Labour council and with it the development plans of the Party and Lend Lease. It will analyse the positive and negative consequences of this approach to campaigning in the hope that lessons can be extracted for other such campaigns across London of which there are many.

8. Analysis.

Political mediation argues that ‘specific movement strategies, activities, and forms in combination with specific political contexts will lead to influence for social movements’ (Amenta 1). The previous section introduced the political context of the case and the journey of the campaign towards a political solution. The following section contains an analysis of what strategies, activities and forms the Stop-HDV campaign utilised to successfully navigate that political route. It draws extensively on the commentary of the activists themselves taken from interviews. These extracts are reviewed using the theories previously outlined in the theoretical framework and background literature. Analysis is divided into three chapters which outline three of the core lessons to be learned from the strategies of the campaign: make the campaign political but not party political; keep the politics grounded in the community; and make use of networks and narrative to expand the impact of the campaign.

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Chapter 1: Political but not party political

1.1. Structuring the campaign to attract a certain network. Engaging with politics brings with it many challenges, not least convincing campaigners to trust in a political system that has not served them well. Issues of ownership and control are never far from the surface, harkening back to Wills’ warning that ‘in trying to pull politicians towards our communities and their needs we have to remember to stay away from them’ (295). The distrust and discomfort around a politicised campaign was the first obstacle to be overcome in Haringey. If the campaign attempted to influence the Labour Party would it risk becoming ‘a Labour campaign’, alienating members and supporters from other political persuasions or none and detracting from the community initiative at its base?

One moment the Labour Party will court local activists another moment if there’s bad press they might just drop you like a hot potato. (Doug Thorpe)

I follow the strategy of engaging with the Council and I’ve huge arguments about this, especially from the anarchist friends who basically say ‘they’re all useless. There’s no point in going. The only point in going is to scream and shout and get dragged out by the police etc’. (Paul Burnham)

There’s various other political organisations, small groups, involved in housing campaigns who do use it [politics] for their own benefit and to exclude other people or make life uncomfortable for other people so other people don’t come along. So it becomes a de facto a bit of a sectarian campaign in reality. (Simon Hester).

It was the structure of the Stop-HDV campaign that prevented that kind of sectarianism and avoided alienating members from other parties and none. With the politically mixed demographic of its membership the campaign managed to frame itself as an open, non-sectarian campaign and attract the kind of cross-party talent and support it needed.

I’ve argued with the SWP, many of them. But we love each other and we know and we learned each other to where we stand. And so we were able to actually get past any political barrier and actually realise the campaign is more important and that plays very well for people who are not used to politics because one of the things that puts people off politics is the arguments and we never had them. We had lots of arguments but the arguments weren’t of a political nature, they were about what we’re going to do (Phil Rose).

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[…] generally it’s been a very non-sectarian thing and as long as people were prepared to get involved and do the work there wasn’t this ‘you’re in the Labour party’ ‘we’re not in the Labour party’ you know everybody was working together (Doug Thorpe).

The campaign formed what is known among left-wing activists as a ‘united front’. ‘Recognizing the conflicts that can arise as organizations articulate different goals, ideologies and strategies, Routledge argues that the interactions an negotiations within the networking spaces prefigure ‘‘a participatory way of practicing effective politics, articulating the (albeit imperfect) ability of heterogeneous movements to be able to work together without any single organization or ideology being in a position of domination’’’ (Levkoe: 175). It was the nature of the united formation of the Stop-HDV that prevented any one group in its network from dominating its agenda or strategy.

We don’t think you can win a campaign on housing or racism or a strike or whatever unless there’s unity amongst the various players, people and organisations who are pursuing their agenda […] United front campaigns pursue limited things like ‘Stop the HDV’ or ‘Stop the Nazis marching’ or something.

So like Stop-HDV meetings typically the organising meetings would let’s say be twenty five people […] I’d say over half those people are Labour Party members and the SWP we would have three or four or five people at it. We deliberately wouldn’t want to try and win an argument by stuffing it full of thirty or forty SWP members and saying oh right now we’re the leadership of the campaign and we’re calling all the shots. That’s not the way we work. If we can’t win a political argument with our allies about the way forward, well we can’t win the argument. So we’re not going to try and dictate terms (Simon Hester, SWP).

The Labour Party are going out knocking on doors saying vote Labour, the Greens are saying vote Greens, the anarchists, who are big in Haringey, are leafleting the Tube station saying don’t vote for anybody! […] But the most important thing is what are you going to do about the issues of the day that affect everybody and let’s work together and let’s work out what’s the best strategy along the way […] what we want is to have a space that’s habitable for different strands of opinion, different interests (Paul Burnham).

I think there’s been a very interesting –because I’ve been around the left myself a long time – a very interesting tacit agreement not to be point scoring or nasty in any

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sense to people we disagree with. I’ve noticed that and I think that’s worked. It’s helped build a social movement (Gordon Peters).

‘How a network “works” and what effects it has depend in large part upon the content of the interactions (ties) of its members’ (Krinsky and Crossley: 3) or as Levkoe defines it: ‘network building as the construction of relational space through processes of interaction between multiple actors, events and activities’ (Levkoe 2014:175). The ties in Stop-HDV were based on a broad leftist viewpoint and the space constructed by its activists was one of unity among campaign members from organisations or political parties with ideologies on various points along the spectrum of leftist politics. The campaign carved out a space for itself that was ‘left’ enough to attract like-minded people but not so narrow as to exclude those that did not agree on the exact details of left-wing politics. This intentionally inclusive composition of the campaign shaped its identity to attract the type of activist necessary for the success of the campaign.

A social movement does not come with a preconfigured face. This identity must be created, among other things via its composition: its membership. The activists themselves via their very membership of the campaign were engaged in what framing theorists refer to as ‘meaning work’: the struggle over the production of mobilizing and counter-mobilizing ideas and meanings’ (Benford and Snow 2000: 614). Hence ‘movement actors are viewed as signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers. They are deeply embroiled, along with the media, local governments, and the state, in what has been referred to as “the politics of signification”’ (ibid).

The type of membership of the Stop-HDV group signified what type of campaign it was. Other potential members could then judge if it was of relevance or interest to them. We must regard networks of such a movement in the way Krinsky and Crossley describe them: ‘as being laden with – and consequential for – constructed meanings’ (9). The individual activist create the label and the label draws in more of those type of individuals. In this way the frame created by the campaign emerges out of and feeds back into its network.

1.2 . United behind Corbyn: a politically mediated frame

A large part of the ability to form a united network of left-wing activists came from the political opportunity of Jeremy Corbyn’s election: a unifying figure for the many on the left within and beyond the Labour Party.

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[…] The other factor is the more political factor around Jeremy Corbyn and ‘Corbynism’ if you like. So for example I was the election agent for the TUSC [Trade Union and Socialist Coalition] for many elections. As soon as Jeremy Corbyn got elected leader of the Labour party and it looked increasingly like there were going to be ‘Corbynista’, Corbyn supporting candidates in various by-elections and things like that, we decided we are not going to stand against Labour left-wingers and we stood down […] That had I think quite a dramatic effect inside the Labour party because they could see that we weren’t…we actually are quite genuine in wanting to see Left unity against the Right. We only could do that previously by attacking the Labour Party because it was dominated by the Labour right. The Labour left was frankly pathetic. But that’s transformed. The Labour left is definitely not pathetic. It’s very serious, very exciting, very good. (Simon Hester, SWP)

[There are] lessons from the HDV campaign about involving the political process. Which is actually quite difficult for an organisation [Radical Housing Network] that came from a sort of quite anarchist roots to contemplate using the activism that’s now taking place in the Labour party following the election of Jeremy Corbyn. Which has actually in some areas at least transformed the membership of the Labour Party and it’s actually…whereas three, four, five years ago when they set up, the concept of working with the local Labour Party would have been…not something that would have entered people’s minds (Doug Thorpe, Radical Housing Network).

Embracing a broad leftist, socialist label was mediated by the political context in which the Left has risen to greater visibility or salience under Jeremy Corbyn. Drawing on Self-categorization theory Huddy ‘attributes group cohesion to cognitive factors such as the situational salience of a group identity that arouses a collective sense of self’ (Huddy 2013: 4). She defines salience as ‘a combination of the readiness to adopt an identity and the relevance of an identity to a given situation’ (ibid: 5). The campaign’s adoption of a Leftist, socialist identity could hardly be more relevant given the situation in which the reenergised left of the Labour Party have installed a socialist leader after decades of centre-right dominance and the party’s membership has swelled dramatically as a result of grassroots efforts to support him.

Self-categorisation research points to the tendency of group members to identify with a ‘prototypic group member’ (e.g, Barack Obama for American Democrats) from which a social identity develops and group cohesion emerges (Ibid). While not all members of the Stop-HDV were Corbyn supporters or even Labour Party members, a sufficient amount of them supported

48 enough of his espoused belief system to rally under the revamped banner he carried. Hence while the campaigners do not all agree with each other on the details of Left-wing politics they agree with enough of what Corbyn stood for to create a political cohesion within their united front.

1.3. Broad network providing protection from criticism

That same political context that provided the campaign with the opportunity to unify the borough’s left-wing activists put it in the path of criticism from those who consider the realignment of the Left in Britain as overly radical. In this regard the fact that the campaign was political but not party political proved beneficial as a counter to media claims that the Stop-HDV was a coup by the hard left.

One of the things that’s always very useful to us is for us to be able to say, when they say ‘oh you’re just a front for Momentum’ or ‘you’re just a front for the SWP’ is for us to say well that’s bollocks because we’ve got support from Highgate through to Northumberland Park [council estate], from Muswell Hill through to Broadwater Farm [council estate]. And when we’ve said that we’ve had people say ‘well what have you got in Highgate’ and we’ve said ‘well we’ve got the Highgate Society have openly condemned the HDV and worked with us’. (Phil Rose)

Highgate village, it’s part Camden, part Haringey. Posher than Muswell Hill. […] And the Highgate Society and the Highgate Literary Society. You know it’s hundreds of years…An enlightenment organisation for the betterment of mankind! It’s all of that. […] ‘The leafy people’ as Phil calls them […] A number of the Highgate Society people were on the email list and contributed to the court case, coming to meetings and so on. So a very different class and background […] It’s about eight to nine years difference in life expectancy between Northumberland Park estate, one of the most deprived in Britain (Gordon).

Attempts by media and political opposition to portray or ‘counter-frame’ (Benford and Snow: 626) the Stop-HDV movement as a mask for Momentum’s radical agenda forced the campaign to engage in a ‘framing contest’ (ibid) with its critics ‘to ward off, contain, limit, or reverse potential damage to the movement’s previous claims or attributes’ (ibid). While the majority of the campaign’s core group is irrefutably socialist in outlook, the addition of such traditionally conservative groups as the Highgate society to its network acts as an insulator against attack

49 from those who would label it as a hard left take over. Though the politics of the campaign might be categorised as radical, its support base was advantageously diverse.

1.4. Harmony at the expense of debate

Much of the non-competitive, trusting relationship enjoyed by the leadership of the campaign can be attributed to the age and experience of the leaders. However ensuring harmony within the mixed politics of the group also meant that robust debate on long-term alternatives to the HDV was sacrificed for the sake of consensus on the short term goal of stopping the HDV.

We didn’t try and do that [come up with alternative options] in the stop HDV campaign because it’s going to be a potentially divisive factor. Because what are we in favour of? I mean there’s some people in favour of social housing. Other people demand it’s got to be council housing at certain levels. What’s affordable, really affordable? All these various phrases. And the potential that if you tried to project what we want to do, what we actually want, that it all falls apart.

[…] I mean if you look at racism for example or different elements of racism. How far do you push the unity around anti-racism? You can have a nice liberal anti- racists unity. But within that there’s divisions. So my position, our [SWP] position is all immigration controls are racist. That’s quite a hard-line position. Most people in the anti-racist movement wouldn’t agree with that. So we don’t push it but it’s there (Simon Hester).

We didn’t [have debates]. Only in the sense that we wanted to stop the HDV. We demanded ballots of tenants. And did we demand council housing or social housing? No social housing. We were even non-specific about what kind of housing exactly […] All of us took that kind of political conscious decision not to find ways to fall out which is very easy to do.

Studies of collective action frames have shown that the flexibility and inclusivity of a movement’s frame correlates to the degree of mobilisation it achieves. ‘The larger the range of problems covered by a frame, the larger the range of social groups that can be addressed with the frame and the greater the mobilization capacity of the frame’ (Benford and Snow: 618). In the case of Stop-HDV the beliefs, ambitions and outlook of the campaign were broad enough to bring a wide range of the borough’s Leftists under its umbrella. But keeping that diverse group together meant keeping diverging opinions to themselves in many instances, restricting the ability of the campaign to proffer detailed alternatives to the HDV proposal.

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The response from the Kober side was ‘all you ever talk about is getting rid of the HDV but you never provide an alternative’. And that was like you know ‘there is no alternative. You can’t come up with an alternative’ (Sue Hughes)

Interestingly, social network analysis will point out that the greater the number of ties between activists e.g. the more shared memberships of groups etc., the more intense their interactions will be and the more they will agree on the cause and solution of their campaign issue. That is to say these ties ‘facilitate the formation and preservation of movement-specific subcultures – wherein shared definitions of the substance, source, and of scope of the aggrieved group’s troubles can develop’ (Krinsky and Crossley: 2). In the case of Stop-HDV it was indeed the leftist ties that brought the campaign’s network of activists together. But rather than leading to a shared definition of desired alternatives these ties were retained precisely because no such agreed definition was sought and disagreement was avoided.

1.5. Summary

This chapter has asked how Stop-HDV managed to negotiate its existence as a politicised campaign without alienating those outside the Labour Party. It did so by creating a network of activists united under the broad umbrella of the leftist politics, buoyed by the remerging salience of the Left under Jeremy Corbyn. The diverse political backgrounds of those leftist activists prevented the campaign becoming a mere offshoot of the Labour Party as some local activists feared. The image or frame this ‘united front’ projected also fed back into the construction of the network as its non-sectarian nature attracted activists with a wealth of experience campaigning on similar Left-wing issues. The main opportunity cost of such harmony was that the campaign did not proffer detailed alternatives to the council’s proposal lest members of different political viewpoints fall out over policy disagreements.

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Chapter 2: Keeping politics grounded in the community.

2.1. Importance of community involvement

Don’t let the politics take over. Or at least make the politics about the community, about the people involved you know. Don’t let party politics take over. Just remember what is important here is the winning and the winning comes from people feeling involved and feeling part of it (Phil Rose)

Despite the obvious benefit to Stop-HDV of engaging with politics, such a campaign must contend with the risk of focusing too much on the political element, to the exclusion of the very community it fights to democratise. It is this that Wills refers to when he talks about the importance not just of how a campaign is built but of who it is built by.

[…] Even the people who’ve been selected as Labour Party candidates who are good, who want to stop it, when they’re just going to Labour Party meetings and they’re doing it internally there’s a tendency to start […] They start thinking about motions and manoeuvring and this and that and the other. And it’s actually having people saying ‘what the hell are you doing? Can you explain this to me? Why are you not voting this way? Because these are our houses, these are our homes that are going’. That actually there’s a reality check that draws people back. I think it will be alright but you can see the process already starting sometimes with people. They get drawn in to just the mechanisms and structures of the party and the council (Doug Thorpe)

There is a constant need to keep the political side of the campaign grounded by the involvement and participation of affected locals.

And that’s the question we always ask as well: how many people in this group are actually affected? Because we want to get as many people who are directly affected to be involved in making the strategy. Because they are the people with the best answers and the best solution and the best motivation if you like to make this a success. They will know when everything’s okay. And they’ll be able to tell us when everything’s okay. Because really, ultimately the decision about what happens: first it’s theirs (Alison Davey).

The inclusion in the campaign of those affected by the HDV, i.e. those on the threatened estates, is vital to the legitimacy of the campaign, the accuracy of the reality it portrays and the consistency of the image it portrays of itself. ‘A frame’s consistency refers to the congruency

52 between an SMO’s articulated beliefs, claims, and actions’ (Benford and Snow: 620). If the campaign demands that the citizens of the Haringey have a say in the redevelopment of the borough then those same voices must be seen to be heard within the campaign itself.

2.2. Challenges to affected population involvement The question arises of how to involve these affected people. There are barriers to be overcome when it comes to mobilising communities, particularly ones previously disenfranchised by the political system, or under resourced by its policies. It’s difficult because it’s so complex the reasons why people choose to get involved or choose not to get involved. I think not least is that people are very worn out you know? In all sorts of respects. If you’ve got young kids, single mum with three young kids how…And Northumberland Park statistically has probably got a very high number of children in it. It’s probably got a very high number of people for whom English is a second language. It’s probably got a high number of people with significant mental health problems, drug addiction and so on. So all those people, it’s going to be very hard for them to come out to meeting (Alison Davey).

[…]When I got my council tenancy, I didn’t say ‘that’s fantastic I can go to meetings’. No. I get my tenancy so that I can move into a house and do this [mimics locking a door] you know? ‘Cruel world fuck off, this is my space where I’ll do whatever I want. My personal space and leave me along thank you very much. When I wish to emerge from my house I will do’. And that’s true for everybody. So it’s certainly not the case that you necessarily want to go to meetings just because there’s something going on you know. Unfortunately estate redevelopment and demolition has become normalised. The whole struggle that they’re doing up there in the council is to try and normalise it. And yet all our struggle is to denormalise it (Paul Burnham).

Even the campaign itself was seen to struggle to keep the affected population at the centre of its efforts, particularly when attempting to broaden its network.

There were certainly tensions within Stop-HDV about, about Tottenham. I mean for example […] there was a march last September […] And the first question is where’s the march going to be? So I said ‘I think we should march, we should meet in Tottenham Green and march up the High Road and into Edmonton’. You know as part of the plan they wanted to knock down a council estate in Enfield as well. So I said ‘let’s march up there’. And they said ‘no no no no no. We have to march to Finsbury Park’ [West Haringey] for some reason. ‘We have to march through

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residential streets’ you know. In the end I was told ‘Paul, you know people from the West of the borough just won’t come to Tottenham’. So even these people who campaign against social cleansing think that Tottenham’s a dangerous place and people won’t go there (Paul Burnham)

2.3. Examples of potential for local involvement

However where the campaign was successful in involving estate residents and those with no previous experience of political campaigning, the affect was hugely beneficial for the campaign and for the expansion of democracy in the borough.

The big change then comes out of a group of people that are experienced, fighting back over the little things. Not just the struggle amongst educated people. But a struggle amongst less educated people. […] You know and they’re engaging with the candidates for the council and finding out that they’re not Gods. They’re human beings that you might be able to work with them and some of them are not as good. They’re, in other words, gaining confidence (Paul Burnham).

When we started there weren’t very many residents on the estates who were prepared to take part in radio interviews and whatever and by the end they were volunteering to do it and people were coming around and they were taking them into their flats (Doug Thorpe).

[…] the key thing for the Stop-HDV campaign were those first couple of demonstrations which showed the anger and the numbers and suddenly boom. You know we’ve got 500 or 1000 local people on a demonstration […] That empowers everybody. I think it provides the motive for all the rest of it to happen (Simon Hester).

2.4. Strategies for involvement.

2.4.1. Ambassadors of the community

So how does the campaign work to engage with and keep its political wing in line with the reality of those affected? One way is by recruiting what may be considered ‘ambassadors’ of the affected community to act as a link between the main campaign and those it is working for.

Northumberland Park Decides is a group of residents from the Northumberland Park area including the council estate threatened by the HDV and private home owners outside the estate. NPD meets of its own accord to discuss the specific effect of the HDV on its area and then liaises

54 with the Stop-HDV campaign in a two-way flow of information. One of the main players in NPD is Alison Davey, an activist who runs a weekly community kitchen and housing advice service. It was clear upon meeting her at the ‘community cook up’ why she was an ideal candidate to provide that link as this extract from field research illustrates:

One of the first things that struck me about Alison when I met her outside Saint Paul’s was her consultation with a passing resident. She was talking about changing the day of the cook up and she said ‘what do you think?’ and then really listened for the answer. Perhaps given the genuine respect she seems to have for the locals it isn’t surprising that they return it. The answer was along the lines of ‘anything you decide Alison, I’m on board with it (Field notes, Tottenham, Tuesday 17th April 2018).

At that same community kitchen I met with Franklin, a Black tenant of the Northumberland Park estate. Franklin, Alison and several other members of Northumberland Park decides were active members in the Stop-HDV campaign, grounding the politics of the campaign in the reality of those it affects.

2.4.2. Dissemination of social justice language

The second approach is an information campaign to inform people of the threat to their homes in the most effective manner possible. This in itself is part of the message of the campaign. Many interviewees criticised the council’s passive means of communicating via its website where the onus is on the individual to go looking for the information rather than the information coming to them. It was the explicit message and goal of the campaign that residents need to be actively engaged with.

I said to Paul look we have to do a map because people will not understand all this chatter about ‘HDV’ and ‘demolition’ and ‘in 20 years’ time’ and a ‘program’ and whatever unless if you show people a map of their area with a red line around it that will explain to people. So that’s what we did, we distributed this map with the red line all over Northumberland Park.

We did a lot of leafletting. I mean a lot […] we’ve alerted people about what is going on. We’ve tried to keep people informed (Alison Davey)

So even though you’ll see a leaflet say ‘come to a meeting’ and then there’s 10 people or 20 people it doesn’t mean that people haven’t read the leaflet. People always say ‘oh leaflets are no good on the estates’. I’m sorry but for me it does.

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Because when you go and knock on people’s doors they will repeat back to you what you wrote on the leaflet three weeks ago and you think thank God, people are reading it (Paul Burnham)

The dissemination of social justice language across the borough and among the residents of the estates through leafletting and meetings was a notable consequence of the campaign. But the campaign was not merely distributing information but being fed a description of the problem by the people it effected. Crucially the story the campaign told and the material for its frame creation was truthful to those who experienced it for themselves.

We went and leafletting targeted estates, held a meeting […] We did our usual thing about the rents and the uncertainty and the tenancy agreements. And these Black tenants just got up and said ‘look, it’s social cleansing. We know what they did in Hackney, we know what they did in Brixton and we know they want to do the same here’. […] So part of what we want to do as well, if you get it right, is to listen to what people are saying and let them write the leaflet. He wrote the leaflet didn’t he? All I’ve got to do is write that down and print it and distribute it (Paul Burnham).

[...] some of them are getting organised, some of them are really articulate. This geaser was at the hustings for the election candidates and he’s talking about ‘gatekeeping’! It’s quite a technical term. […] You go onto the housing list, you get accepted into temporary accommodation and then they ‘gatekeep’ you. The council officers’ strategy is ‘how can we keep these people out of secure tenancies?’ Because secure tenancies are kind of an anathema to government policy. The last thing they want is to create any more secure tenancies. ‘How can we keep these people out? We’ll shove them off into private tenancy. We’ll make sure they don’t quite understand if they accept it they’ll never get the council tenancy. And we’ll successfully gate keep them. Keep them out’. And this guy says ‘look, the problem is gate keeping. The problem is gentrification. The problem is social cleansing’ (Paul Burnham).

The campaign drew heavily on this narrative of that the borough was being socially cleansed. If a campaign’s framing of the issue is to resonate with the population it hopes to mobilise it must embody a certain amount of salience for them. Benford and Snow identify three dimensions of such salience: centrality, experiential commensurability, and narrative fidelity (621). Centrality asks how central are the values and beliefs behind the frame to the lives of the people it tries to mobilise. Experiential commensurability asked whether the issue framed resonates with the

56 personal everyday experience of those people. And narrative fidelity asks if the frame is recognisable within the cultural narrative: its myths, it’s inherent ideology (ibid: 621-622). By actively engaging with the residents the campaign did not necessarily draw huge crowds of social housing tenants to its meetings. But it did insure that it’s portrayal of the problem was in line with the lived experience of the affected population so that on the occasions when the two did join forces for demonstrations or media interviews they were singing off the same hymn sheet.

2.5. Uncovering the political reality

The kind of information distributed via leafletting and meetings acts as an access tool to the political policy realm that shapes the everyday reality of the borough’s residents. It is a tool for articulating the social reality and thus a means of confronting it: the conversion of knowledge into power. But this information needs to be dug out from within the political realm, often from underneath many layers of intentionally overwhelming bureaucracy, and assembled to create a clear picture of what’s going on for those outside the fold of the council and its cabinet.

[…] There’s a whole kind of issue there about democracy isn’t there? You’re expanding the democratic space. […] You know, can you have a ticket line? Can you have a demonstration? Can you find out what happened in a meeting? You know we’ve established you can find out.

The council’s these days produce vast amounts of documents if you like. All online. And then somewhere in it there will be a little thing about you know ‘we’re thinking of bundling up council estates’ and then you know we picked it up and then you go off and you kind of get campaigning over it.

[…] Before they do their ‘demolish the whole area’, they do a housing needs survey: a strategic housing market assessment and a local plan. […] I’m reading it and what jumps out at me: ‘48% of local households have no savings or they’re in debt’. Council housing of course is the only tenure you can get into without an advanced payment. Everywhere else in the housing market to buy a house or rent a house or get shared ownership you’ve to put money up front. And people don’t have savings so it’s a huge social issue. So I go and bang on and on and on about the 48%.

And then you’ll obviously think ‘well what’s the ethnicity break down?’ So then I went to Freedom of Information and said ‘can you give me this hidden survey that you’ve referred to please and I’m especially interested in the ethnicity breakdown of the savings’[…] So they write back and say ‘oh no we don’t have them, nobody asked

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about it’. So I think ‘that’s the thing. That’s the indictment of these people. They never asked. That’s the reality. So they’re building all these homes that people can’t afford. Their own evidence shows that people can’t afford them because not only have they got no savings, they’re in debt. […] And you’re excluding these people when you’ve never asked what was the ethnicity breakdown.

So eventually they released the figures. […] Then we press release them. Then you send them to the election candidates. Then you say, you know, ‘sorry this is what institutional racism looks like. You don’t ask the question and the reason you don’t ask the question is you know what the answer’s going to be’. (Paul Burnham)

They can’t deny it. They gave us the evidence. […] A serious lesson that FOIs are very important. And read what they give you.

I would never have read it. I would have been bored after two minutes. […] They [other Stop-HDV members] go through it and they pick out the stuff and you don’t think it means anything and then they explain it to you where it all links up and they show the links with another document and another document and they build up a picture of what’s going on. (Phil Rose)

This process of diagnoses and treatment is at the core of collective action framing. ‘Collective action frames are constructed in part as movement adherents negotiate a shared understanding of some problematic condition or situation they define as in need of change, make attributions regarding who or what is to blame, articulate an alternative set of arrangements, and urge others to act in concert to affect change’ (Benford and Snow: 615). A campaign must build a shared understanding of the problem, what is known as “consensus mobilization”, before it can expect people to move to address by way of ‘action mobilization’. As Benford and Snow put it ‘the former fosters or facilitates agreement whereas the latter fosters action, moving people from the balcony to the barricades (ibid)’. Through the painstaking construction of the borough’s political reality via information requests the campaign painted a clear picture of a problem: regeneration without proper consultation, and a perpetrator: the right wing of the Labour council. They then needed a platform from which to implement their desired change.

2.6. Mutual dependence of political and non-political campaign elements

What emerged in Haringey was a campaign with an issue but no platform, and a party with a platform in search of an issue. The fact that the campaign and its political affiliates maintained such a narrow focus was central to their success.

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I mean basically the one issue in those meetings was ‘are you for or against the HDV?’ Now there are people in the Labour party who argue that transformation would have happened anyway but actually I think it’s the cross fertilisation of the two things that make it happen. Because the campaign gave the issues to the Left- wing activists in the Labour party who would have wanted to change the Labour Party anyway. But it gave that unifying issue across the board. And people that weren’t in the Labour party you know didn’t mess it up by getting involved in those things (Doug Thorpe).

The Labour Party provided the platform for democratic expression of opinion and the Stop-HDV campaign gave the community the information to form their opinions, something the Labour Party itself couldn’t do. The anti-HDV members of the Labour Party needed the campaign to inform the public of the issue as they could not speak out against their own party’s proposal. They outsourced the critique of their party to their colleagues in the Stop-HDV campaign. At the same time they provided the campaign with vital information on the complex inner workings of the Party so that major political opportunities such as deselection would not be missed.

It comes with a lot of strings attached being in the Labour party […] I didn’t know about the whip. Where you aren’t allowed to vote against something even if by conscience you disagree with it. So it was really hard, even though there have always been a few anti-HDV Labour councillors they could never really speak about it. So it’s had to come from the grassroots (Alison Davey).

There were people who knew the process but wanted to keep their heads down but they would pass the information on to others like Phil Rose, Phil Jackson [Stop-HDV campaigners] who could be much more vocal about it because they didn’t want to be councillors. The ones who wanted to become councillors had to in some ways be quieter or otherwise they wouldn’t have made it onto the panel. But their knowledge and their knowledge of the process was still put out (Doug Thorpe).

You can’t replace Labour candidates unless you happen to hit the right time when the reselection process is taking place […] You know, another campaign can’t really do that once we’ve got past these May elections until you’re approaching the next load of council elections. But I think it’s partly being aware of that. And I guess one of the strengths of the HDV campaign having those few people from the Labour party involved just over a year ago was the awareness of the structure and the fact that that process was going to take place. Because if we, if they hadn’t been involved even if the timing had been right we wouldn’t have been able to get involved in it

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because we wouldn’t have had the people inside and we wouldn’t have known what the structures were and how you do them.

Those ‘few people from the Labour Party’ acted as crucial brokers between the campaign and the Party. In social network analysis ‘the concept of brokerage hinges on the structural potential to share information (and control its flow) with and between two or more otherwise unconnected actors’ (Krinsky and Crossley: 11). The party had the structural resources to make a change but it was the campaign that energised the community to the extent that enough Labour Party members were sufficiently informed and impassioned about the issue to attend in unusually large numbers. And it was the Labour members of the campaign that facilitated that relationship through their role as brokers.

There’s a huge new membership of the Labour Party but as with most political organisations it’s largely passive. It comes out and where you’ve seen it in the past is every time Jeremy Corbyn has been challenged as leader this membership comes out and votes for him but they don’t go out every month to their local Labour Party branch meetings. But because the message about the HDV had got out and that got out through the demonstrations, even when people didn’t come on the demonstrations, when you’re building the demonstration if week after week you’re standing outside a tube station giving out leaflets, even though the people may not come, they know. They’re aware of the issue so that when the protest takes place and it wasn’t passive. Labour Party members were canvassing, not telling people what to do but just to get them to meetings. To let them know that meetings were taking place. They didn’t have to tell people what to do […] They just needed to be alerted to the fact that this thing was taking place. […] I’m not saying the HDV couldn’t have been defeated eventually but we couldn’t have defeated it as quickly if it hadn’t been for that huge Labour Party involvement (Doug Thorpe).

That reflects the new found confidence of the Labour left. And that’s part of the role of the campaign. The Stop-HDV campaign energised the Labour left internally. And they felt kind of obliged to follow through their part of the campaign. That was their job: they had to sort this internal problem out in the Labour party. […] I mean there were roughly 1,000 Labour Party members who met to reselect the councillors in Haringey. That’s not an insignificant number of people (Simon Hester).

It was this mutual dependence and cooperation of Party and community that proved crucial to the success of the Stop-HDV campaign. Each lent fuel to the other: the Party relying on the

60 community for ammunition and the community emboldened by the possibility of tangible change in the political system.

Political opportunities are not set in stone but open to interpretation and to an extent made real by the way they are perceived and articulated. A favourable political context must be recognised for its potential and then framed as such in order to convince people of the opportunity it presents. ‘To proffer a collective action frame is to suggest that an opportunity to affect social change exists, and that people are “potential agents of their own history”’ (Benford and Snow: 631). There are some people who are a bit over-worried. You know ‘if we touch this political process we’ll taint ourselves. We should be purely organising on the estates with residents’. But actually the residents and tenants are more likely to get involved if they think they’re going to win than if they think ‘there’s just these people coming out telling us to go on another demonstration’ (Doug Thorpe).

It is the role of the campaigner to package political opportunities in such a way as to sell them to the population they need to mobilise. ‘If movement activists interpret political space in ways that emphasize opportunity rather than constraint, they may stimulate actions that change opportunity, making their opportunity frame a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Benford and Snow: 631). The campaign sold the residents a political context in which they felt motivated by the potential for victory.

2.7. Political dangers of a single issue campaign

Much of the success of the campaign has been explained by the fact that the development plan was so extreme as to unify the borough around one single issue. Multiple factions of politics and civil society within Haringey came together in agreement to oppose this particular mutual threat. Candidates for the council realised that their legitimacy in the eyes of the community and by extension their success in the upcoming elections depended on their stance on the HDV. Just as Polletta outlined, ‘highly regarded roles within communities may come to be linked with activism in a way that makes participation a requirement of the role’ (Polleta 290): candidates who had any chance of leading the council after May’s election were required to have some involvement with Stop-HDV.

[…] they were selected on that mandate. It was very clear. Whichever way those meetings went it was a single issue. Councillors, I mean normally they would be

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going for a whole load of different things but this was overridingly the issue. Basically once you said which way you were going to go on that- it depended what the balance of that meeting was- but there was no other real issue during the selection process (Doug Thorpe).

But there are consequences when a campaign with a political outcome is driven by one issue alone. Deselection was effective because it was about one clear position: pro or anti HDV. But what does it mean for a borough to have a Labour council that on paper agrees on only one issue?

[…] Whether you’re right or left in Haringey has become defined about whether you support or don’t support the HDV regardless of other issues. Now we’ve got a majority of candidates who are against the HDV, what people talk about is a ‘Momentum run council’ or a ‘Corbynite council’. And actually the kind of core of candidates that you could consider ‘Corbynite’ candidates is actually quite small. Everything was just done whether you were pro or anti-HDV. Which very soon is going to cause all sorts of problems about other forms of privatisation, outsourcing, school funding, anything you can name that might also be a left-right issue. There might not be agreement within the candidates we selected for the Left (Gemma Short).

It’s going to be the first so called ‘Momentum dominated’ so called ‘Corbynista council’. It’s a left council. It will probably be the most left-wing council in the country, certainly in London. What are they going to do? Everyone’s going to be watching. And they’re personal friends of mine many of them. And comrades, I consider them comrades. […] So we’ll see what they do. Because they’re going to be in one hell of a bind (Simon Hester).

Anything the other council would do because they’ve got no money, we would do the same but we’ll be attacked because we’re the left-wing council that deselected 20 people. So we’re seen as the devil by the Standard and the Times and all the right-wing press (Phil Rose).

The perception among the national press and general public that the new council is ultra-left wing brings with it certain expectations that simply don’t align with reality. The label of ‘the most left-wing council in the country’ has put it on a pedestal without the support of any increased resources or power. Up there it is an easy target for right-wing press and political opposition and has a long way to fall in the eyes of its own supporters who want to see radical

62 change. There is no guarantee that the new councillors will have either the resources or the will to effectively initiate such change.

It’s not enough. Because even if we’ve got all these lefty, Stop-HDV Corbynistas […] how are they going to build a thousand or 10,000 council houses that we need? […] They’re going to have to stand up to central government in some way or another I think. And against the property developers. And somehow not succumb to the terrible pressure that they’re going to be under.

A future Haringey council would have to be pushed and pressured because you shouldn’t think you well you get the right people in place and then it will all go right you know? It doesn’t work like that. You keep the pressure on. (Gordon Peters).

Politically things are going to splinter because the Labour Party is not a cohesive organisation. […] And there are different, I call them red lines, dividing factors amongst the Labour council and the labour councillors. So who the new leader’s going to be and how the new leader’s going to work and all the rest of it is not insignificant factors in all this (Simon Hester).

The good thing is I think they recognise that and they keep saying to the people that aren’t in the Labour Party ‘make sure you keep us’ you know they call it ‘keeping our feet to the fire’ –I don’t know what that is. It sounds like some horrible torture. But we have to hold their feet to the fire which means that, if they waver we’re going to have to stop it […] Because even if the HDV is gone there might be some other equally dodgy schemes afoot you know? (Alison Davey).

But it may prove hard to criticise the people the campaign has put in power; the ‘personal friends’ and ‘comrades’ referred to by the campaigners. The new councillors are going to come under pressure from national government as well as from within the Labour Party itself which has no agenda for the radical opposition of budget cuts. The downside of a strong united front is the question of how to break that unity for the sake of the affected community.

[…] The Labour left usually tends to be the one that has to make unpopular decisions i.e. shit on their own support. It’s often the Labour left that are expected to keep everybody quiet. Because we’ve all got these Labour lefties in. It’s our council. These are my friends. It’s comrades you know. And if they do things that I don’t like and we want to campaign against, we could all fall out (Simon Hester).

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2.8. Summary

How did the campaign overcome the danger of focusing too much on the political side of things to the exclusion of the affected population and the destruction of its own legitimacy in the borough? One strategy to avoid this was the involvement of unofficial community ambassadors that acted as linking agents between the borough-wide campaign and the affected estates. The second route was an active engagement with the residents of the borough, something the campaign claimed the council failed to do. In opening a dialogue with residents via meetings and leafletting the campaign grounded it’s framing of the issue in the lived, everyday experience and cultural reality of the borough’s residents.

Meanwhile, articulating the borough’s political reality meant detailed digging into an often opaque council decision making process via FOIs and assembling a picture of what the campaign was up against. Once a clear picture of the issue was formed the campaign reached out for a platform from which to address it. They found the deselection process of the local Labour Party, the details of which were provided by brokers within the Party supporting reform but without the freedom to seek it openly. The campaign and its political wing within the Labour Left became mutually dependent. One provided the mobilisation while the other supplied the platform from which to act, the success of each feeding into the confidence of the other. By making the HDV the campaign issue in May’s local elections Stop-HDV became a synonym for being Left-wing, side-lining other policy issues in the borough and leaving the new councillors to face unavoidable criticism from those who consider it ‘the most left-wing council in the country’. With no additional resources new councillors will need to be consistently lobbied by the community to ensure they do not stray onto the same path of their predecessors, implementing budget cuts without question and selling council assets without due consultation.

Chapter 3: Broadening the impact of Stop-HDV

Having harnessed political power to great effect at a local level the campaign continues to face the challenge of engaging in a politics of scale, sharing lessons and impact beyond the borough. The creation of a larger network of groups fighting similar issues facilitates a pooling of knowledge and creates a more powerful unified voice advocating alternatives to current regeneration plans, many of which have gone ahead despite opposition from communities and residents.

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3.1 Mistaken for Momentum: A hindrance or a boost?

Ironically, one of the greatest sources of publicity and attention for the campaign beyond Haringey was its association with Momentum which was neither accurate nor intended. The Stop-HDV campaign had minimal involvement with Momentum after the original meeting from which the campaign’s founders split in frustration. However the perception of a link between the groups lingered in media and political commentary. The perceived involvement of Momentum in the campaign was both a hindrance and a boost to the campaign’s efforts to gain traction for Stop-HDV beyond the burrow.

Haringey was right down the list. People would write about Lambeth and Southwark, Focus E15 and Butterfield estate, Newham and we’d been dropped off the list […] and now we’ve come right up to the top of the agenda. So that’s fantastic on the one hand. On the other hand the lies and distortions obviously are not good. But you know that’s, that comes with the territory really (Paul Burnham).

The territory referenced here is the polarisation of left and right wing politics in Britain and the similar divide within the Labour Party itself that leaves groups such as Momentum and campaigns affiliated with it open to attack on the grounds of radical politics. This political context defined the network of the campaign without its consent and granted it the publicity that went with that imposed affiliation despite the campaign’s insistence that it was not as the right-wing press labelled it ‘a front for Momentum’.

That’s the stick we were beaten with by the leader of the Labour party council. She was beating us with that stick. And she was doing a fair job to get everybody to uptake that part. And have us demonised by everyone. (Joy Wallice)

There were however many intentional attempts by the campaign to expand its message to a national level and to network with similar groups throughout London and further afield. Some of this was achieved through the initiative of the campaign members alone and some emerged out of political channels of the Labour Party.

3.2. Networking via the campaign

[…] The strength that you get from campaigning across the whole of London for example is phenomenal. The feeling of power. Apart from the actual impact but just the feeling. (Alison Davey).

The campaign worked directly through its individual activists as well as indirectly through its network of groups to spread its message and encourage other campaigns to learn from its

65 successful engagement with politics. Members of the core group took turns speaking to campaigns and activists throughout London. Meanwhile lessons from the campaign are to be collated by the London-wide Radical Housing Network of which Stop-HDV is a member group.

[…] good examples of good local practice are what everybody wants to see don’t they? And I think the possibility of that here. […] People approach people like me and they say ‘can you come over to Wandsworth or Hackney and talk to us about HDV and what’s good about it and what implications we could draw’. So these connections you know. And we do that and that reverberates (Gordon Peters).

[…] one of the tasks they [the Radical Housing Network] are trying to do is build up a resource bank, gathering in information from all the campaigns that can be used as a central store so that people can learn about things like how you make freedom of information requests, how you can utilise the courts, lessons from the HDV campaign about involving the political process (Doug Thorpe).

Each individual member of the Stop-HDV core group brings not only their own experience but the weight and resources of the other groups they are affiliated with. For example Doug Thorpe is a member of the Defend Council Housing which in turn is a member group of the Radical Housing Network. His membership of the London-wide network meant the Stop-HDV campaign did not have to start from scratch when it came to contacting other groups and campaigns either for support or to share their message.

[…] it meant the links were already there so that when an issue came up those people say ‘oh well that’s similar to the Heygate, that’s similar to Cressingham’ well immediately you know who you can get to meetings. […] I guess part of the value of the network is you’re not coming to reinvent those links all the time. When somebody says ‘how do we get the message out to all these areas?’ you just utilise the list from the network. You don’t have to go compile it yourself.

[…] I mean the demonstration in November was promoted as a London wide demonstration so immediately I then took on the job of pushing it out through the network and some of it is as easy as just putting it onto the list because the list already exists so there’s hundreds of people already and they just get it straight away. I can also then individually contact lots of the campaigns so then you have you know they speak at your events, they send their banners along and you do the same to them, you talk to each other as well (Doug Thorpe).

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Stop-HDV has also creating a ripple effect by catching the attention of other councils considering similar schemes.

About the time of the deselections or the reselections, whatever you call them, people across the other Labour parties in London were noticing. Because they’d been up against it. In Lambeth particularly, where they seem to have a pretty sort of dictatorial regime there and they, Lendlease, have redeveloped the Ailsbury estate which is still in contest in the courts. Hardly any social housing […] And we’ve heard they’re saying ‘if only we could do what Haringey could do and get rid of some of our Labour bosses’. So they’ve picked all that up. […] The Labour party people here in Stop HDV have talked to different boroughs: Ealing [West London], Kingston [Southwest London]. So everybody is picking it up (Gordon Peters).

In August 2017 Camden Council switched from a HDV-style redevelopment plan to a community lead project. Camden Green Councillor Sian Berry is a member of the General London Assembly, which scrutinises the activities of Mayor Sadiq Khan. Speaking after Camden’s decision Berry, who had previously been to speak with the Stop-HDV campaign said ‘it is good news that Camden is ruling out the most destructive and risky of its options for regeneration in future. I’m sure the scandal over Haringey doing a similar deal, as well as the extra scrutiny of the CIP Challenge project [a local information campaign against the development], will have helped with this’ (Crossley 2017). That the campaign managed to connect with a politician like Berry means that its message has been disseminated both horizontally to a neighbouring borough and vertically through an ally who is also well placed to influence the city-wide policy on housing.

3.3. Networking via political allies

Meanwhile significant work was done within the Labour Party to bring the local struggle to a national level, availing of internal party mechanisms for ‘scaling up’ (Levkoe 2014) and taking advantage of political opportunities such as the annual Labour Party Conference.

Stop-HDV Tottenham Labour Party group went to the Brighton Labour Party conference and they talked to Corbyn the day before he made his speech and they passed a motion about ‘do you know what’s happening in Haringey?’ And a lot of people from across Britain were all there too and they supported that motion. And Corbyn in his speech the next day, one of the things he said was ‘and as for housing, we’ll stop the right to buy, wholesale demolition, regeneration of estates. It’s not the way to go about community renewal and he said there must be ballots in estates […] Straight to the national. […] Because it’s Labour Party principle he deliberately

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didn’t mention Haringey specifically but everybody knew what he was talking about. And the press media picked it up as well. We had a lot more press contacts following that, saying ‘oh actually what are you doing in Haringey?’ (Gordon Peters)

The Stop-HDV members of Tottenham Labour group managed to merge the campaign’s message with that of the Labour leadership and in doing so create a bridge between its specific demands and a broader vision broadcast by Jeremy Corbyn based on social values. Aware that the new Labour leadership would be laying out its vision at the Party Conference the Tottenham Labour group took advantage of the fact that it’s demand for ballots on estates fitted with Corbyn’s slogan of a Britain ‘for the many not the few’ and tapped into the kind of cultural values he seeks to reinvigorate on the Left. ‘The practice of ‘frame bridging’ involves a kind of brokerage that enables ideologically congruent frames to join together’ (Krinsky and Crossley: 4). This kind of merging of messages is often seen between movements that have no previous links. However in the case of Stop-HDV, the campaign used the political side of its existing network to utilise its ties to national politics, the Labour group acting as brokers between the local and the national, the community and the political.

Huddy outlines how a leader can directly mobilise members by the way in which they interpret and articulate the group’s grievance (Huddy: 16). The fact that the HDV was indirectly included in the leader’s speech plucked it from the level of local concern and brought it into the national fold as an issue symbolic of the type of the values Corbyn’s leadership presents as fundamental to a better society. In this way, via the political route, the campaign managed to catapult its local issue onto that national agenda and to pressure the Mayor of London who has the capacity to enact such change on a London-wide level.

The commitment from the mayor of London who has a big influence on housing policy across London, to commit to ballots of tenants.: that’s the key demand and that seems to be winning. […] Now if that can happen –and I’m sure it’s a spinoff of our campaign – then that will have a huge, huge, long term ripple effect at quite a big level (Simon Hester).

In its work to expand the message and impact of Stop-HDV the campaign and its political allies are engaging in a strategic politics of scale. The point of a politics of scale is that ‘as socio-spatial relations change, they produce a nested set of related spatial scales that define an arena of struggle where conflict is mediated and compromises are settled’ (Levkoe: 175). That is, a campaign such as Stop-HDV is fighting an issue that exists on multiple levels: immediately at the local level; structurally on a London level; and ideologically at the level of national politics.

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‘Social movements that reflexively consider their actions as a politics of scale may discover new opportunities to create and renegotiate activities in relation to different scales of action’ (ibid). To effectively achieve its aim Stop-HDV recognised the need to make use of its political and non- political network to upscale its campaign and reach beyond the borough.

Yet even a change in national Labour Party policy won’t guarantee ballots or improved forms of consultation with residents. Each local Labour group is free to make its own policy and is not bound by national Labour decisions.

Local Labour groups have a huge autonomy to decide their own [policy] […] You could argue in certain circumstances localism is a good thing but actually this is very…it’s problematic where in these circumstances you’ve got a progressive national position and you’ve got regressive local authorities holding out (Doug Thorpe 20)

The campaign has taking inspiration from and advantage of a political situation in which the leadership of the Labour Party has suddenly shifted dramatically in their favour. And yet this opportunity is not all it is made out to be. The leadership is not the powerful ally that it may appear to be based on an increased membership and the success of Labour in the last general election. The campaign must be careful not to rely too heavily on the agenda of one man who does not enjoy the broad support of his parliamentary party.

It’s a fascinating and amazing situation. So Corbyn’s been if you like, lifted up from essentially elderly, principled back bencher, walking down the road one day, to […] ‘alright it’s my turn’, classically. Kind of gets lifted up to be leader of the Party and there’s like ten socialist MPs in the parliamentary Labour Party. So in a sense he can’t then lead a campaign to deselect the other 240 can he? Because he’s going to be smashed. And equally in local government you know because of the way that neoliberalism has worked through local government and circumscribed the things that councils used to do, local government’s become the bastion of deep connectivity with private sector interests and the politics to match in the Labour Party for a long, long time. And you know there are a lot of young councillors who are in the pipeline to being Labour MPs as well. And much as I would love Corbyn to kind of tear into them and much as he’s called on to tear into them and much as the anarchists have denounced him for not doing it you know how can he? He’s always pulling arrows out of his chest and arrows out of his back so to speak. How can he? He can’t attack the entire parliamentary party and replace them. He can’t attack all the cabinet, all the councils, all the place all the time (Paul Burnham).

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Just as the campaign needs to take advantage of the surrounding political context to boost its agenda, it must be cognisant of the instability and limitations of its own political allies. Though it has taken inspiration and confidence from the realignment of the Left under Corbyn, it cannot place its future in the hands of someone whose own position is by no means secure. In the same vein there is a danger of the campaign becoming overly reliant on individual ‘good’ politicians within the council and conflating their leadership with a broader victory.

It’s extremely important but it’s not a substitute for political strategy which it sometimes becomes. So this thing about ‘what’s going to happen after the new council?’ being answered by ‘I trust Ruth Gordon [one of the anti-HDV candidates]’. Have you heard that one? ‘I trust Ruth’? I don’t distrust Ruth. But that’s not what it’s about […] The more important thing for me at the moment is the programme. My programme is stop the targeting of council estates for demolition.

[…] It’s not a question of whether she supports it or not. It’s a question of what the new Council’s going to be like. What the new cabinet is going to be like. What the slow motion avalanche that the [council] officers embody is going to be like. What the mayor of London and the GLA (General London Assembly) are going to be like. And then what the developers are going to be like.

And in Tottenham there’s huge amounts of power that those ‘good individuals’ are going to be dealing with so you know just trusting them as people isn’t enough. What we want to do is get together a situation where we stand up against the GLA (Greater London Authority). The fact that people talk to you about Claire Kober [recently deselected council leader] and they don’t talk about the GLA for example, is really bad news. […] These issues are going on all round Britain but they’re much more intense in London because the housing market is much more distorted in London. And where does it revolve around? It doesn’t revolve around Claire Kober. It revolves around City Hall, or it should be. City Hall’s getting away with it. Sadiq Khan’s getting away with it. What we need to do is bring around the kind of coalition of concern that we have created in Haringey […] We need to put a militant coalition of concern around City Hall (Paul Burnham).

Several activists expressed a fear that the campaign would get tied up in what could be regarded as ‘adversarial frames’. These ‘seek to delineate the boundaries between “good” and “evil” and construct movement protagonists and antagonists’ (Benford and Snow: 616). ‘Since social movements seek to remedy or alter some problematic situation or issue, it follows that directed

70 action is contingent on identification of the source(s) of causality, blame, and/or culpable agents’ (ibid). This simplified distinction which attributes ‘saviour’ and ‘villain’ labels among the players in the campaign and council acts to focus blame and push for a clear ‘better’ alternative. But it risks creating an overly narrow view of the problem and solution. It relies on the assumption that all that is wrong with the council can be purged by the resignation of its leader and that the problems of the borough (regardless of their connection to the city-wide and national agenda) can be solved by a new individual in charge. A campaign such as Stop-HDV must contend with the danger that its members will become overly focused on the individual politicians that spearheaded either the HDV project or the campaign to stop it and that influential factors external to the borough will go unchallenged.

3.4 Challenging the narrative

It is not the act of deselecting alone but the upsetting of a dominant narrative that made Stop- HDV a topic of interest beyond the borough.

I think it’s the idea that you can actually put pressure on the traditional political structures that people had lost any faith in. Because there seemed to be this general basically A-political agreement between all the major parties that seemed to exclude people (Doug Thorpe).

The articulation of this exclusion was central to the Stop-HDV campaign and the dissemination of its message across London. The strength of collective action framing as a process is that it is contentious and disruptive. ‘It involves the generation of interpretive frames that not only differ from existing ones but that may also challenge them’ (Benford and Snow: 614). The campaign managed to invert the narrative that the council was working in the interests of the residents for the improvement of the borough. Instead they framed the council’s policy as an example of democratic failure.

The Stop-HDV’s demand for a ballot of residents went straight to the heart of this narrative, a demand so intrinsic to democratic expression that it challenged anyone to argue against it and not come under fire for ignoring constituent’s wishes.

You know it’s like should we have a yes or no say on…Should the people who live here have a say on whether they want it to happen. Now there could be a situation where even a beneficial type of development might get blocked by existing tenants on a kind of NIMBY basis […] So you have to be a bit careful about the ballot demand. But it did provide a way into the democracy (Doug Thorpe).

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3.5. Challenging the question

Certain political contexts present the opportunity to challenge dominant narratives. For an example of where political mediation, networking and framing converge one should consider the access that networks of housing campaigners had to politicians in the wake of the Grenfell fire and the accompanying potential to challenge the dominant frame presented by those decision makers. In the below extract one of Stop-HDV’s activists explains a meeting between the housing minister and housing campaigners arranged by Eddie Daffarn. Eddie is the author of a blog which had long highlighted issues at Grenfell Tower including fire safety which brought him to media and political attention after the fire.

Do you know who Eddie Daffarn is? […] I met him before the fire. Skyped him, Facebook friended him. He was traumatised. He’s come back into activity now. And because of this famous blog he’s got access to the ministry. […] So he’s got the ear of Dominic Grant who’s the housing minister. And Eddie then said to the minister ‘I want you to meet some housing campaigners’ and the minister has to say yes because now it’s the ‘we’re listening’ phase you know. If a Grenfell survivor says ‘I want you to listen’ then ‘yes we’re going to listen’. […] So eventually we had a meeting with Dominic Grant, 10 people […] You know one of the things he said was ‘don’t you think there’s a stigma against you because your tenants?’. And some of the good people kind of fell for it by saying ‘I’ve always been working, I’ve never claimed anything’. Next person said ‘I’ve always been working, most of us have been working. It’s the private tenants in our block who hold parties at night and cause noise’. Next one said ‘I’ve always worked, I never claimed a penny’. […] When it came to me I said ‘there is no stigma because our secure tenancies help to make Tottenham a mixed community including the poor and our rent regime does the same and we’re proud of it and we’re not going to give it up’. So it’s a different political tradition there. […] Dominic Grant said ‘well I think that estate redevelopments make mixed communities’. I said ‘you talk about a mixed community. Well we’ve got a mixed community in Tottenham. Every team that played in the world cup has measureable local support. You know but it’s a mixed because it includes the poor and working class via council housing and I went on about, saying ‘look at the kind of developments that are coming in now’ and I went through the debacle with affordable housing jargon used to exclude people. He said ‘oh well I’ll come back to you on that’ (Paul Burnham).

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3.6. Challenging the image

Internal debate occurred among the campaign’s core group as to how best to communicate the exclusion of resident’s voices by the council.

The Stop-HDV itself campaigned with the slogan ‘no permission for demolition’ […] The slogan to get ballots is ‘No demolition without Permission’. So I erred to the right and made a right-wing deviation and political error in saying we must have ballots and therefore we must use the slogan ‘No Demolition without Permission’. And the anarchists, correctly said ‘fuck off. The slogan is “No Permission for Demolition” […] We’ve got that out there. That then has an impact around London. What’s so special about Haringey? Nothing. And you can do it as well (Paul Burnham).

What is referred to in the above extract is a debate commonly referred to within social movement theory as a ‘frame resonance dispute’ which erupts from a disagreement over ‘how reality should be presented so as to maximize mobilization’ (Benford and Snow: 626).. Such debates facilitated the honing of the campaign’s protest frames i.e. the kind of message conveyed by their demonstrations etc.

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Protests and demonstrations became a source of symbolism as well as a means of mobilising the affected population. One of the first large Stop-HDV demonstrations was a ‘noisy march’ that took place outside the Haringey Council chamber while the councillors were inside discussing the HDV described below in a group interview with three of the campaigns activists.

We had cow bells, my kids all had cow bells and I had a colander that by the end of the day was completely squashed by the wooden spoon (Florence Allaway).

So when we was all banging on there they must have been able to not think because the noise was just that terrific (Joy Wallice)

Well I was in the council chamber because I was doing a deputation with Paul Burnham yeah and I remember coming outside afterwards and saying ‘it was fantastic because we could hear you all the time in the council chamber’ […] it was the background to the entire meeting (Sue Hughes).

The demonstrators at one point attempted to break into the building and storm the chamber. The action created a strong story of a community with no place at the discussion table going to great lengths to have their voices heard in a system trying to keep them out.

The campaign chose its publicity material with purpose and care: homemade, emotive signs held by residents acting as a counter weight to the council’s portrayal of run-down, uninhabitable ‘sink estates’.

[…] we did this stuff in Wickham, we branded the campaign ‘Hands off Our Homes’. When the campaign started, somebody from the press or local paper phoned me up and said ‘can we meet you and take your photograph?’ […] So I arranged it from work, to pull together a group of people holding up these things saying ‘Hands off Our Homes’ in front of this sheltered housing estate. That became the iconic image of the campaign that the press then used. Every time they ran the story as it were they ran this bloody photograph.

That’s how we won it by working to take over the narrative. They try and do the complete same. Their narrative is ‘regeneration’ […] making things better for people, lots of people smiling in the sunshine. So we then say ‘not everything’s awful’. So never use a photograph of the garages in Northumberland Park , you know don’t do that. You should have people standing up and speaking out. So homemade signs are absolutely key. So we’re holding a protest, Inga turns up with her homemade signs and I go [‘perfect’ hand signal] (Paul Burnham).

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The woman named Inga referred to is a resident of Broadwater Farm, infamous as one of David Cameron’s so called ‘sink estates’ and one of the sites threatened by the HDV proposal. Inga began an art project called ‘I love my home: a beautiful place not a sink estate’ in an effort to reshape the perception of the estate and reclaim the narrative from negative media coverage.

They [the council] are quite deliberately doing that. Downgrading the people and the place: ‘well it’s kind of run down and they’re run-down people aren’t they and a run-down place’ and saying ‘we need to get incoming ambitious people. Hipsters first and then other development after’ you know. That’s a well-trodden process that they want to happen (Gordon Peters)

[…] If we do a press release or anything, how can we make that much better version which we have? […] Part of the way there is to have images of the estate. Beautiful images of the estate to show what it is that you might lose (Paul Burnham).

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(The garage at Broadwater Farm estate. ‘The media always come along and take pictures in the dark. Makes it look like something from a Film Noir’ –Inga Bystram.)

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(‘He looks like a Hoody but he’s a really nice guy who is also an artist’ – Inga Bystram)

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Creative tactics of this kind are part of a powerful counter-diagnosis of the problem called ‘frame transformation’ (Benford and Snow: 625) in which existing meanings or understandings are challenged with new ones. The estates which are labelled as run- down and dangerous by local and national authorities are repackaged as homes worth saving by the very people who know them inside and out.

Though this element of the campaign may be considered a kind of ‘soft power’ compared with the ‘hard’, tangible processes of a court case or deselection process, this type of project lays the groundwork for those more obvious forms of campaigning. In this sense, rebranding exercises such as this are an ideal example of collective action framing which are ‘action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization’ (ibid 614). Via ‘soft’ tactics such as this community portrayal of its own reality, the campaign told the story of a community shut out by its politicians so that when the opportunity to deselect candidates came along the groundwork had been laid to justify that ‘hard’ tactic as a fitting end to journey towards greater democracy and inclusion.

3.7 Summary.

This section analysed the campaign’s strategies to expand its success beyond the borough and create a wider, more powerful voice for community led regeneration. Much of the campaigns publicity came from the misconception that it was a front for a Momentum coup within the council. But recognising the influence of the city-wide and national political landscape on its local issue the campaign also worked to spread its message and motivation via the networks of its individual members and the access of its political allies. Acting as brokers between the borough and the national Labour Party the campaign’s political allies worked to bridge the message of the campaign with that of the Labour Leadership, aware of the salience of Corbyn’s vision among the British Left. And yet the campaign must be alert to the dangers of putting its fate in the hands of a leader whose own fate is far from secure. Nor should it be lulled into the false belief that the replacement of one ‘bad’ council leader with one ‘good’ one will solve what is a multi-layered problem spanning across the offices of the Mayor of London and the Conservative national government.

The campaign’s message has also been diffused via a process of counter-framing and contestation of dominant narratives undertaken by its activists. They challenged the narrative of a council beyond reprimand via deselections; the agenda around social housing and mixed

80 communities via frank engagement with political elites; and the public image of ‘sink estates’ via creative projects and a focus on the human side of the story.

9. Conclusions

9.1. Relevance of research.

This research was conducted in the hope that it can provide the basis for a future framework of lessons for other housing campaigns throughout London and indeed the UK. The following section provides an overview of five core lessons from the rare success of the Stop-HDV campaign.

9.2. Summary of findings and lessons learned

1. Be political but not party political. Political diversity within the campaign’s membership can help avoid the campaign functioning or being seen to function as an offshoot of a single political party. However keeping a range of political activists united may mean sacrificing debate on policy details and putting forward alternative solutions making the campaign’s goals quite short term. While it is mutually beneficial to match a single issue campaign with a party in need of an issue through which to reform, it can leave the borough with a council that agrees on only one thing: the reversal of a single policy with no predetermined alternative plan. The fallout from this will be judged in the coming months.

2. Spread the words. Effective framing and widespread articulation of the campaign issue relies on extensive and often mundane research into the political reality of the borough via information requests and archive thralls. Without this detail of a councils plan there is no way of combatting it. Once uncovered this invaluable knowledge can be distributed throughout the community. This can then be linked with the social justice language to describe the phenomena it belongs to. For example the use of the term social cleansing is empty without proof that the council is aware that proposed new homes will not be available to a large proportion of current residents. And the evidence of the council’s plans relies on vocabulary such as social cleansing so package the issue in a social justice context and inspire mobilisation.

3. Choose campaign strategies that counter the failures of the opposition.

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The campaign actively engaged with residents and created a narrative that aligned with the expressed reality of the affected communities. This not only leant it legitimacy but also placed it in direct contrast to the council which the campaign framed as blind and deaf to the wishes of the community. Such engagement relies on the involvement of pre- existing ambassadors that enjoy the respect and trust of those communities.

4. Don’t place hope or hate in one leader. Activists expressed dismay at the tendency of some campaigners to lay all the blame for the HDV at the feet of the former council leader and to put all trust of a brighter future for Haringey in the hands of her successor. To succumb to either instinct ignores the broader political picture and relinquishes London and national authorities of their role in this case and in cases like it throughout the city and the UK. One of the successful side- effects of the campaign was to alert residents to the extent of the control their local council has over their daily lives. But while they act to regulate authority they must not lose sight of the other players in what is a mutli-level game of politics. Though the campaign took advantage of the political opportunity that is Jeremy Corbyn’s reinvigoration of the Left, he alone does not have the structural authority or the political strength to safeguard their victory in the long term.

5. Link demands to a higher message and challenge the dominant narrative on all fronts. A combined awareness of political opportunities and a network of political allies with high level access allowed the campaign to merge its local issue with the broader values and demands espoused by the Labour leadership, bringing the local to the national level. The campaign also took every opportunity to challenge the dominant narrative regarding estate regeneration in order to start a broader debate on the logic of the current approach. The most obvious ‘shake up’ of this status quo was the deselection of pro-HDV councillors but campaigners also worked to challenge the agenda of political elites, such as the then housing minister, as well as preconceptions about ‘bad estates’ via more creative means such as community led art projects.

9.3. Potential future research.

Over the course of a month’s fieldwork in Haringey numerous avenues of potential research arose, not all of which can be outlined here. Below are two areas of interest stemming from this case study and the knowledge generously shared by activists interviewed.

1. Radical and realistic: alternatives to the HDV.

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Though the campaign did not proffer any detailed alternatives to the HDV proposal for regeneration, discussions did occur between Labour members of the campaign. Some suggested alternatives to private partnerships involved notable council tax increases for the boroughs wealthy with exemptions for low earners, a major ideological policy shift that would require a referendum and undoubtedly cause further schisms within the Labour Party. Such plans for experimental radical politics at a borough level are not without precedent in UK political history. Under the slogan ‘better to break the law than break the poor’ Militant, the Trotskyite faction of the Labour Party, attempted to radically reform Liverpool council in the 1980s to the condemnation of National Labour and the ruling conservative government. If the tactic of deselection and council reform is to spread to other London boroughs, an analysis of the alternative options for regeneration and avoidance of budget cuts open to radically left-wing councils seems pertinent.

2. Mutually assured construction: The relationship between Labour Party councillors and property developers.

The dynamic between Labour council and property developers was raised as an issue of concern by almost every interviewee including members of the Party itself. Two of the main concerns involved the attendance of Labour councillors at annual property fairs such as Mipim in the south of France, and what was described as the ‘revolving door’ between Labour councils and consultancy positions with development firms. One interviewee (who’s anti-New Labour bias must be noted) claimed ‘local government’s become the bastion of deep connectivity with private sector interests and the politics to match in the Labour Party’. As an organisation traditionally aligned with and heavily influenced by trade unions it is interesting to what extent the financial constraints on councils has pushed the ideological loyalties of local Labour groups closer to the private developers and what effect this may have on the composition of the Party. Is the influence of property developers at council level equivalent to the influence of the trade unions at national level and if so what consequences does this have for the cohesion between the national party and its local councils?

9.4. Reflection and closing remarks.

Perhaps one of the most gratifying aspects of this research was the fact that multiple activists remarked on how beneficial the interview process was for them to reflect on the campaign, the logic behind its strategies, and its long path to success. In delving into the impact of politicised campaigning in the fight against exclusionary regeneration projects it is hoped that this project has produced more than academic research for the sake of it. As one of the activists put it best,

83 the Stop-HDV campaign was an exercise in the expansion of democratic space. The value of this research lies in the engagement with and clarification of that exercise both for those who dared to undertake it and for those who would learn from their story.

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