community and housing

Well, well, well, just when you think society cannot become more debased, news comes along that Laura Johnson has been appointed permanent Director of Development and Property at the Barnet Group, which manages the borough's 13,000 council homes. This is the same Laura Johnson who, as Director of Housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, played a principal role in the cost-cutting that led to the Grenfell fire.

A member of SolFed and the London Renters Union will be giving a talk on a little known case of working class direct action; the Stepney rent strikes.

The rent strikes organised by Stepney Tenants Defence League in the thirties saw barricades raised at blocks of flats and stopped evictions, got rents lowered and forced landlords to do repairs. What can we learn today from this exemplary movement? Come and hear tales of flour bombs and rolling pins and discuss the lessons of the rent strike for our movement today.

The talk will take place on Wednesday the 29th of October, at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road E1 5QJ, from 7pm to 9pm.

A planned eviction of of tenants in East London was stopped by people from London Renters Union blocking the doorway for five hours. The landlord and estate agents repeatedly came to the house, and people several times linked arms and blocked the door. Finally the landlord agreed to some breathing space for the tenants, who had nowhere to go, to find a new place.

Most evictions are not resisted, often the landlord does not even get a court order, tenants simply leave. Is it really worth doing eviction resistance, when the tenants will have to move out eventually?

Do you want to organise in your workplace? Do you want help others organise? Do you want to form a solidarity network to fight dodgy landlords and grasping bosses? Do you want to do some grenade organising and flyer random workplaces or blocks of flats just to see what happens? Do you want to do all that along anarchist principals and not get bogged down in union bureaucracy or derailed by party political wrangling? Well, North London Solidarity Federation wants to do those things to, and we will be holding an open meeting at London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street, London E1 1ES, from 2pm to 4pm, on Saturday the 23rd of November, with the aim of getting some of those projects going in London.

Problems at work or with your landlord? We’re here to help.

WHO WE ARE

We are SolFed, your local Anarcho-Syndicalist Solidarity Federation. We have locals across the UK, and worldwide as part of the International Workers’ Association. We’ve been around since 1950, so you can be sure we know what we’re doing.

WHAT WE DO

• We fight for workplace rights
• We fight for your rights when the landlord tries to screw you
• We help organise actions for the rights of LGBTQ+, racial minorities, migrants, workers, & more!

(Psst! No membership required! Just contact us!)

A tenant renting with a major local letting agent won back the entirety of their “0 deposit” charges after two pickets of the letting agency. A member of Brighton SolFed recently moved out of their rented property and was hit with a number of absurd end of tenancy charges. They had entered into a “0 deposit” tenancy, managed by a third party company who were chasing up our member for these costs. Disgracefully, the company were charging a significant fee just to challenge these costs, which forced our member into paying these charges, despite disagreeing with them all. 

Newcastle SolFed stall in Sunderland on Sat 19 Nov 11am to 1pm

Unpaid wages? | Housing issues? | In need of Solidarity?

Visit our stall at Market Square

@NewcastleSF