On Saturday 20 November Labour Left Internationalists hosted a Zoom meeting about the housing emergency.

It was the first of a series of “link-with-campaigns” meetings we plan with speakers from left and labour movement campaigns. The next is on Saturday 18 November (4:30pm), about health and social care.

Video recording of the lead-off speeches here:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=589166532166267

Dave Renton spoke first, drawing on his new book based on his work as a housing lawyer, Jobs and Homes.

https://www.lag.org.uk/shop/products/210105/jobs-and-homes

The housing benefit system is working to enrich private landlords: we need to campaign for rent controls, and for the Tory government to come good on its repeated and broken promises to repeal Section 21, which allows for “no-fault” evictions.

Paul Watt presented evidence based on his book on estate regeneration in London.

https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/estate-regeneration-and-its-discontents

Estate regeneration as currently practised displaces and disperses council tenants. It reduces the available council-housing stock, while turning over much of the previous council-estate land to new high-rent private accommodation.

The background is the council housing stock being eroded by Right to Buy and by near-zero new council house building, especially in the New Labour years; and government cuts leading councils to do inadequate maintenance and renovation on estates.

Andrea Gilbert spoke from the Labour Homelessness Campaign. They have been working to help people facing No Recourse to Public Funds rule, and will shortly be launching a campaign on the issue of temporary accommodation granted to those deemed homeless. Some 95,000 households are in temporary accommodation, including 120,000 children; the accommodation is often poor, and often a very long way away from where they apply as homeless.

The Labour Homelessness Campaign has also been working, and successfully, with ACORN and with groups like the London Renters’ Union, to block evictions.

Martin Wicks spoke from the Labour Campaign for Council Housing. LCCH got a composite including its demands passed by Labour conference 2021. It is now urging CLPs to pass motions on the following lines:

“Call on the Party nationally to implement the composite resolution as a matter of urgency; Call on our Labour Group to propose that our council declares a housing emergency to campaign for those key demands. This may include lobbying local MPs, the Local Government Association and other organisations, working with tenant groups and trades unions”.

The chief points in the composite were: Fully funding councils to deliver the building of 150,000 social rent homes each year, including 100,000 council homes

Ending Right to Buy

Reviewing council housing debt to address underfunding of housing revenue accounts

Fund the retro-fitting of council housing to cut greenhouse gases, provide jobs and promote a shift from outsourcing to Direct Labour Organisations

Ending Section 21 (no fault) evictions”.

Some useful links provided by the speakers:

Declaring a housing emergency – a model motion for CLPs and unions

http://www.shaction.org

https://extra.shu.ac.uk/ppp-online/press-ganged-generation-rent-youth-homelessness-precarity-and-poverty-in-east-london/

https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/tooting-eviction-live-woman-to-22133016

https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/eviction

https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/homelessness/emergency_housing_from_the_council

Welcome to Renters Power Project!

The Housing Emergency: make Labour act! Saturday 20 November 17:00-18:30

https://www.facebook.com/events/722188715403553

Zoomlink http://bit.ly/lli-h or http://bit.ly/hous-m or https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89987346975

Speakers include:

• Dave Renton, housing lawyer

• Professor Paul Watt, Birkbeck, University of London. Author of recently published book, /Estate Regeneration and its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/estate-regeneration-and-its-discontents

• Andrea Gilbert, Labour Homelessness Campaign

• Martin Wicks, Labour Campaign for Council Housing

The latest government figures show only 1,100 council homes started, only 800 completed, in the first two quarters of 2021. Even before the government lifted the pandemic evictions ban, almost 100,000 households were recorded as homeless at the start of 2021. 26% of adult renters in England – or 5.3 million people – already say they cannot keep their homes warm in winter, mainly because of high private-sector rents. Over two-fifths (45%) of England’s private-renting adults have been the victim of illegal behaviour from a landlord or letting agent. Overcrowded housing has been a main reason for high Covid tolls among ethnic minorities and the worse-off.

Next LLI-MI committee meeting

Saturday 20 November 4pm, just before the housing meeting.

Winning global climate justice: migrants’ rights and global redistribution: Monday, 8 November⋅09:30 – 11:30
https://www.facebook.com/events/933107993987677

The Housing Emergency: make Labour act! Saturday 20 November 17:00-18:30

https://www.facebook.com/events/722188715403553

Zoomlink http://bit.ly/lli-h or http://bit.ly/hous-m or https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89987346975

Speakers include:

• Dave Renton, housing lawyer

• Professor Paul Watt, Birkbeck, University of London. Author of recently published book, /Estate Regeneration and its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/estate-regeneration-and-its-discontents

• Andrea Gilbert, Labour Homelessness Campaign

• Labour Campaign for Council Housing

The latest government figures show only 1,100 council homes started, only 800 completed, in the first two quarters of 2021. Even before the government lifted the pandemic evictions ban, almost 100,000 households were recorded as homeless at the start of 2021. 26% of adult renters in England – or 5.3 million people – already say they cannot keep their homes warm in winter, mainly because of high private-sector rents. Over two-fifths (45%) of England’s private-renting adults have been the victim of illegal behaviour from a landlord or letting agent. Overcrowded housing has been a main reason for high Covid tolls among ethnic minorities and the worse-off.

Next LLI-MI committee meeting

Saturday 20 November 4pm, just before the housing meeting.

Monday 8 November 9:30-11am

To win global justice – global climate justice – we need international redistribution to equalise and level up internationally; and migrants’ rights and free movement for everyone, everywhere. What do these mean in practice, and how to we fight for and win them?

Contributors: Abel Harvie-Clarke – Labour Left Internationalists (formerly Momentum Internationalists); Alena Ivanova – Labour Campaign for Free Movement

Register

By Stephen Wood

“Refounding Momentum”, described as “a deliberative process that will radically redesign Momentum’s constitution, structures and how we organise with each other”, has stalled. Or so it seems.

On 26 September interim proposals from the “Momentum Assemblies” should have been published, with amendments allowed up until 24 October. Then an all-members ballot is due for December.

The last official communication, 13 September, reported two assemblies on “politics and people and “power and participation”, but since then there have been no social media posts, no emails to members, nothing on the Momentum Slack channel.

The lack of discussion or even acknowledgement of the missed deadlines should be of concern for an organisation that now reports going from a high of 45,000 members to 20,000.

Labour Left Internationalists (formerly Momentum Internationalists), who submitted proposals https://momentuminternationalists.org/2021/07/15/momentums-refounding-process-two-proposals/ back in July, will continue to campaign for a genuinely democratic Momentum, and meanwhile work on regrouping and reactivating the internationalist Labour left. §

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy is circulating this suggested wording about the rule change on selections passed at Brighton Labour Party conference, 25-29 Sep 2021.

To: Labour Party NEC

This CLP notes:

1)     Labour’s Annual Conference is the sovereign body of the Labour Party. The Rule Book, Chapter 1.VI.1 clearly states: “The work of the Party shall be under the direction and control of Party conference”;

2)     the composition of shortlisting panels for snap parliamentary elections was agreed by Labour’s 2021 Annual Conference as: 3 CLP reps, plus 1 NEC rep and 1 REC rep;

3)     despite this, the Party assembled a shortlisting panel for the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election selection comprising of: 3 NEC reps, plus 1 CLP rep and 1 REC rep;

4)     the justification for not following the rule agreed by Annual Conference, according to a report on Labour List, is that the new rule was “inexpertly drafted”;

5)     the Party employs staff to advise on “technical” matters and in the past, if HQ has considered something was ‘poorly drafted’ staff would have advised the CLP before Annual Conference;

6)     whether the drafting was carried out “expertly” or not, the intention of the rule was clear to Conference and remains clear now.

We support the decision of Annual Conference and believe that CLPs should play the key role in selecting their parliamentary candidates.

Accordingly, this CLP calls on the NEC not to overturn party democracy and instead to respect the decision of Conference that the composition of shortlisting panels should be: 3 CLP reps, plus 1 NEC rep and 1 REC rep.

By Martin Thomas

The Labour Party’s National Executive (NEC) has said it will ignore a rule-change passed at this year’s Labour conference (25-29 September) to safeguard a local say in shortlisting in short-notice parliamentary selections.

The NEC has cited unspecified legal problems. For the upcoming Old Bexley and Sidcup selection the shortlisting committee will be three NEC members, one Regional Exec, one local, not three local members, one NEC member, and one Regional as in the rule change.

The rule change had to be submitted in June for consideration at conference (while NEC-drafted changes were, as often before, dropped on delegates at the last minute). No legal problems were flagged up then.

On 23 October, newly-elected National Constitutional Committee (NCC) member Rheian Davies was suspended on thin grounds about old social media posts.

At the conference, the left won two out of four National Constitutional Committee places up for election. The elected NCC has been replaced in disciplinary processes involving “protected characteristics” by a board appointed by a committee appointed by the general secretary, but still has a part in others.

Members in local Labour Parties and in the unions must assert ourselves against Keir Starmer’s feverish drive to make Labour “safe for business”.

Black History Month Zoom meeting: Tue 26 October 6:30pm

For Black History Month in the UK, we will be discussing a 1939 essay by C L R James on black history and class struggle. bit.ly/clrj-39 – Zoomlink bit.ly/clrj-z

Making Labour act on the housing emergency: Saturday 20 November 5pm

Zoomlink bit.ly/lli-h
Speakers include:
• Dave Renton, housing lawyer
• Professor Paul Watt, Birkbeck, University of London. Author of recently published book, /Estate Regeneration and its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/estate-regeneration-and-its-discontents
• Labour Homelessness Campaign
• Labour Campaign for Council Housing

The latest government figures show only 1,100 council homes started, only 800 completed, in the first two quarters of 2021. Even before the government lifted the pandemic evictions ban, almost 100,000 households were recorded as homeless at the start of 2021. 26% of adult renters in England – or 5.3 million people – already say they cannot keep their homes warm in winter, mainly because of high private-sector rents. Over two-fifths (45%) of England’s private-renting adults have been the victim of illegal behaviour from a landlord or letting agent. Overcrowded housing has been a main reason for high Covid tolls among ethnic minorities and the worse-off.

Next LLI-MI committee meeting

Saturday 20 November 4pm, just before the housing meeting.

MI is now Labour Left Internationalists

Our planning meeting on 10 October 2021, following the Brighton Labour Party conference, elected a new committee and decided to change our name to Labour Left Internationalists (formerly Momentum Internationalists) to signal a broadening of our activity. More: bit.ly/mi-lli