Month: July 2018

The Haringey Development Vehicle – a Triumph of Local Democracy against Gentrification

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Following the resignation of Claire Kober, the beleaguered Labour leader of Haringey Council, the controversial Haringey Development Vehicle – or HDV – looks set to be dead and buried. But was the anti-HDV campaign really propelled by the so-called “hard-left”, or was it local residents taking a stand in their community? DMU postgraduate student Ryan Farrell’s blog on this issue is based on his essay written for the “Democratising Urban Spaces” module, as part of his MA in Politics at DMU.

The halting of the Haringey Development Vehicle was a triumph of local democracy and accountability by local residents against a council that doggedly pursued a public-private partnership with an international property developer. The Labour-led council in the North London Borough of Haringey was planning to form a joint venture with Lend Lease that would have involved privatising vast swaths of public property – including municipal assets like libraries and schools – and transferring it into a £2bn private fund. The council boasted of the creation of a new town centre, 5,000 new homes, and thousands of jobs for local residents over a 15-20 year period. So why, then, were local residents so overwhelmingly against the proposals?

There is no doubt that London is in the grip of a major housing crisis, and one that needs to be dealt with fast; it has economic impacts, such as decreased productivity, as well as social ones, like rising poverty, inequality, homelessness and rough sleeping. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said that City Hall needs to build 66,000 homes a year in order to deal with the needs of London’s housing crisis, with 65% of these needing to be affordable. Across England, the number of rough sleepers has more than doubled since the Conservative-led coalition came into power in 2010, rising year on year. Official government data shows that rough sleeping across England has risen for the past six years in a row. In London, the pattern has been the same – there were 3,975 people sleeping rough in 2010-11, and more than 8,000 in 2015-16. Clearly, then, something radical needs to be done.

The term “regeneration” is a particularly emotive one, and is often seen as merely a coded way of saying “gentrification”. That is, redeveloping land and pricing residents out of communities. But few urban regeneration projects in recent years have attracted the level of attention the Haringey Development Vehicle has. The London Borough of Haringey has a population of approximately 270,000, and is highly socio-economically diverse. Highgate in the West of the borough is one of the city’s most affluent areas, while conversely, Tottenham, located in the East, is increasingly deprived. It was here that the 2011 riots were sparked, after local Tottenham resident Mark Duggan was shot dead by police.

The council had a sound case for swift, decisive action, with a social housing waiting list exceeding 9,000, and first-time buyers struggling to get on the property ladder, with modest one bed properties selling for upwards of £400,000. The then-leader of the council, Claire Kober, spoke of the challenge to “find new and different ways to generate income” back in late 2014. Tensions have been fraught between the Labour-led Haringey council and the Parliamentary Labour Party, including from the area’s two MPs, David Lammy and Catherine West. In an open letter, the two local members of parliament citied concerns regarding the affordability of the home that the HDV project will offer, and the lack of transparency and consultation with local residents. Seen as a dig at the proposed scheme, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at the 2017 party conference alluded to “forced gentrification and social cleansing”. Local residents and business owners set up the Stop HDV project to raise awareness of the council’s plans, in an effort to mobilise opposition to the scheme.

The HDV scheme is now all but defeated. Haringey’s Labour Manifesto pledged to stop the controversial scheme, and a final decision will be taken in July. The push back against an unpopular “regeneration” scheme has been labelled as a “systematic takeover” by the “hard left” – but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, it was local people who stopped the redevelopment project, not a select few with political agendas. Residents from all – and no – parties participated in demonstrations, lobbied their local MPs, and voiced their concerns to local councillors. Crowdfunded by local residents, 73-year-old resident Gordon Peters requested a judicial review into the HDV – which was subsequently won by the council. The council persevered, even when its own scrutiny committee advised the scheme be halted. Claire Kober resigned from her position as leader of the council in February, amid claims of sexism and bullying.

After sustained action on a local level by the residents of Haringey, including the borough’s two constituency Labour parties, the two local Labour MPs, the grassroots campaign group Momentum, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and people who had never been involved in politics in their lives, the HDV scheme now looks doomed to fail. Councillors who supported the scheme were either deselected by local party members and replaced with anti-HDV candidates, or pulled out after the first round of voting. The right-wing media attempted to frame this as a “purge”, but it was anything but; this was democracy in action. After the recent local elections on May 3rd, the council is still Labour-run, although the borough elected three new Lib Dem candidates, surely reflecting the anger towards the HDV scheme. Claire Kober, the council’s former leader, now works as Director of Housing at Pinnacle, a property management firm.

So what implications, then, does the HDV phenomenon have for democratising urban spaces, and if public-private partnerships aren’t the solution to the capital’s burgeoning housing crisis, what is? One approach that truly involves local residents is community land trusts. In 2015, the NHS announced the sale of two-thirds of land – 7.1 hectares –  from the site of the St Ann’s Hospital in Haringey. Planning permission was granted for 470 homes, with 14% “affordable” (defined as 80% of market value); none were designated for social tenants. The St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust (StART), a community land trust that pre-dates the HDV debacle, was set up by local residents to fight the plans. The 360-strong membership meet regularly to discuss the priorities, which reach far beyond the call for genuinely affordable housing – StART also want to maintain the natural environmental beauty of the area, and ensure the continuation of mental health services on the site. The best hope, StART believed, was to persuade the Greater London Authority (GLA) to purchase the land, keeping it in public ownership and ensuring any homes built are genuinely affordable. StART’s negotiations were a triumphant success, with Mayor Sadiq Khan purchasing the site, using the new £250 million Land Fund for the first time. The deal will see up to 800 new homes built, with at least 50% being affordable – a significant increase on the existing planning permission for the site. Revenue raised from selling the land to housing associations, councils and community land trusts will be reinvested into the Land Fund to purchase further sites in London. StART’s membership is growing, and the trust is aiming to raise £50 million in order to maximise the number of genuinely affordable homes. The potential of community land trusts and community-led development is endless, and as demonstrated by StART, extends far beyond the issue of housing.

Ryan Farrell is a postgraduate student studying for an MA in Politics at DMU, where he also completed an undergraduate degree in History and Politics. His academic interests include trade unionism and grassroots labour movements, Marxism, environmentalism and nationalism.

The 2018 Mexican presidential results: between Lula, Messi and the Bolivarian Revolution

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In today’s post Dr. Valeria Guarneros-Mesa reflects on the recent electoral victory in Mexico of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She argues that ‘AMLO’s’ victory is an important win for the Latin American left that is likely to follow a Lula-style “progressive neoliberal” agenda, rather than a revolutionary “Chavista-Bolivarian” one. Valeria also points to some of the likely frailties of AMLO’s project to redistribute wealth and battle corruption, such as the institutional embeddedness of corruption and deep-seated tendencies to “caudillista” leadership. She argues that the best hope for counter-acting these is for MORENA (the coalition led by AMLO) to maintain and strengthen ties with civil society and critical social movements.

By 10:30pm of 1 July 2018, preliminary electoral results started to indicate that Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the winner of the Mexican presidential election. AMLO, the candidate for the Together We Will Make Histoty coalition (composed of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), Social Encounter Party, and the Labour Party) won with almost 53% of the votes, while obtaining a majority in Congress and the Senate. Commentators have underlined the results as a historical moment for Mexican politics and its electoral democracy. The results caused moments of exhilaration and joy for a majority of the population and revived hope in Latin America’s left. But for many others, this was a moment of anguish, disappointment and concern as they envisaged the challenges that a fragmented and violent Mexico will bring, accompanied by the unfounded fear by liberal-conservatives that Mexico will become another Venezuela, another dictatorship.

The immediate comments, after the preliminary results were published, underlined the effectiveness of the electoral democratic institutions in so far as the incumbent party, PRI, and the other traditional parties, PAN and PRD, were recognising their loss and congratulating AMLO for his victory. AMLO’s presence in Mexico City’s Zocalo late that evening was accompanied by words of gratitude that were emotive and fulfilling people’s hope. AMLO’s reiteration that his government was to be ruled by three principles: ‘not lying, not stealing and not betraying the people’ seem to mark a clear distinction against the political corrupt oligarchy of the PRI, PAN and PRD. These warm words, however, did not reassure people who experienced political violence during the day of the election in cities of Jalisco and Puebla States.

AMLO is unlikely to follow Chavismo’s Bolivarian Revolution of the 21st Century. Instead, it is more likely that he follows the steps of Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, through redistribution of wealth, while maintaining a ‘progressive’ neoliberal economic approach that promotes global trade and finance with regards to commodities.

Two elements provide an indication to make this a credible argument (but see Financial Times for a contrary view). The first is the fact that the core of the old oligarchy that supported Salinismo began to support AMLO’s candidacy few weeks before the elections. Salinismo (1988-1994) was the presidential period in which neoliberal economic polices reached their peak and when NAFTA was signed.

These new alliances indicate that AMLO obtained their support in exchange of continuation with neoliberalism and to counter the threats that NAFTA’s dissolution cast upon the country’s current economy. His book ‘La salida’ also shows cosmetic modifications to the wave of privatisations in the education and energy sectors introduced in the post-2012 years.

The second is AMLO’s attachment to the corrupt machinery that has permeated Mexican politics. Several individuals supporting his campaign have had records of embezzlement, hence the likely assumption that these common and corrupt practices will begin to infiltrate the good intentions that AMLO’s persona insists to tackle.

The lack of transparency in selecting MORENA’s candidates for several political local posts has been one of the main criticisms against AMLO’s inability to break with clientelism and co-optation. On the one hand, this forms part of the tactics the mafia’s political system relies on and; on the other hand, it breaks with any channels of communication held with social movements that gave birth to MORENA, let alone with those that sit more on the radical spectrum of the Left and which are key to bring into account AMLO’s government and other political and economic institutions.

Civil society and its activism have been considered the main axis to counter the continuation of neoliberal politics and corruption. However, progressive critics sustain that civil society is not ready to scrutinise government. Social movements have used different repertoires of action that include fighting the Mexican state (i.e. Zapatismo and its legacies), collaborating and negotiating with it (clientelism and co-optation) and, more recently, recurring to socio-legal action to sue the state abuses against human rights of indigenous and other marginalised communities.

However, mobilisations’ multiple repertoires of action to counter the state in intermittent ways are not including mechanisms of scrutiny and oversight that the political system requires to minimise impunity, beyond the state’s own reforms to its judicial and prosecution systems. Although this type of experience from civil society is not inexistent (for example, Artículo 19 or Instituto de Acción Ciudadana para la Justicia y Democracia), it is quite fragmented and too small to counter the great machinery of state corruption.

AMLO’s administration will encounter another challenge with regards to its leadership. As all good charismatic leaders in Latin America, the figure of a single, strong ‘caudillo’ is a formula that all political leaders instinctively pursue. This has been observed from Simon Bolivar fighting Spanish colonialism, to Fidel Castro’s communism and Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution. AMLO will be no different, especially as his leadership derives from this same understanding. The problem is that this type of leadership suffers from the Lionel Messi curse of overperformance, observed in the 2018 World Cup match Argentina vs Croatia, where the latter won by 3-0 as the whole Argentine team was relying on Messi to score.

If MORENA and its coalition are to be able to transcend, a cadre of multiple leaders must be prepared to relay AMLO. It is precisely this lack of shared leadership that has led ‘pink tide’ front-runners Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales to organise referenda to make constitutional changes that allow presidential re-elections and prolong their periods in office. Centralisation of power, while a new successor is appointed, is likely to become a tactic to which AMLO may recur to if his admnistation is not watched closely.

Finally, if AMLO’s administration is to transcend, it is because it is not left alone, the internationalisation of what is happening at the grassroots level, within and against the state, must be recognised. His administration has not only to maintain open and transparent channels of communication with social movements, civil society groups and ordinary citizens and build a shared leadership; but also, initiatives that prompt these grassroots to contribute to the broader ‘transnational social class’ -which has aimed to challenge decisions that tend to benefit the traditional neoliberal oligarchy -shall be encouraged by his administration.

If his coalition is genuinely wanting to become a motor of historical transformation, as opposed to just ‘the left of the institutionalised right’, relationships with other international Left parties, which have been more genuine to include grassroots and establish links with social movements, (i.e. Corbynism and DiEM25) have  to be consolidated, alongside the emblematic Latin American spaces created by the World Social Forum and Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas-People’s Trade Agreement. A recognition and acceptance of international groups’ criticisms against the state’s human rights abuses and violence, must be included in his government plans, which unfortunately have been a moot topic in AMLO’s campaign.

Valeria Guarneros-Meza is Reader in Politics and Public Policy, De Montfort University and a CURA member.

Municipal What? Reflections on #municipalsocialism in the 21st century

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Dr Bertie Russell – research associate at the University of Sheffield’s Urban Institute and contributor to our recent Municipal Socialism conference – offers some core reflections on the role of municipalist political strategies for the 21st Century. Central to his argument is a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of political scale, decenter our conception of the state, and develop a counter-history of municipalism that learns from the wealth of international examples outside of the UK. This piece was originally published on the Realising Just Cities website.

The “Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century” conference – hosted at De Montfort University by the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) – offered a much-needed starting point for bringing together academics, trade-unions, party organizers and progressive think-tanks to consider the role of urban politics in transformative social change. That Labour’s “Community Wealth Building Unit” held their meeting immediately after the conference suggests that these discussions are not taking place in an academic vacuum, and may increasingly come to play a role in defining contemporary socialist strategy in the UK.

As we move forward, we should perhaps take Miguel Robles Durán’s opening demand for “an anti-capitalist provocation of what a city can do” as our common point of orientation, a reminder that we must remain committed yet critical in the development of political strategies of scale. With this said, here are some quick reflections on the importance of this conference, and why it may come to mark a starting point for addressing some of the most pressing political questions of the Left.

  1. This needed to happen

The last five years has witnessed a global renaissance in transformative urban politics. From the emergence of the movement-party Ciudad Futura in Argentina to the territorially grounded political strategies in Jackson, MI, we are witnessing a wave of political experimentation that wagers on the municipality becoming a privileged site for left organizing. These initiatives are collectively challenging many of our inherited assumptions about the role of the state in socialist organising, antiquated distinctions between the private and the public, and unhelpful binaries between ‘local’ and ‘global’.

Meanwhile, Corbyn’s announcement of the ‘return of municipal socialism’ has built on the successes of Preston’s community wealth building approach, leading to Labour establishing a community wealth building unit. A raft of articles and policy papers have started to appear calling for the municipalisation of services and utilities such as water and telecommunications, whilst some local labour groups have begun to release manifestos that claim to put ‘municipal socialism at its heart’.

There is a wealth of critical thought that needs to be brought to bear in developing an “anti-capitalist provocation of what a city can do”, not least critical geographic insights on the politics of scale, and the incredibly rich ‘state debate’ that occurred throughout the 1970-80s. These insights, coupled with richer and more nuanced understanding of these movements, are essential if we are to avoid falling into a reductive localism that limits the potential of ’municipal socialism’ to redistributive service delivery. The new municipalist movements are demonstrating that practice is currently developing faster than theory, and we’re in a privileged position to collectively develop our theoretical understandings of what 21st century socialist organizing can look like.

  1. Municipalism ≠ municipal socialism ≠ municipal enterprise

The conference was mired by a fundamental slippage in terminology, that led to many of the discussions and contributions working (or not working) across purposes. Furthermore, some of the terms themselves are contested – not least municipal socialism – with different historical accounts and differing emphases. To offer some clarity:

Municipal Enterprise

At it’s simplest, municipal enterprise refers to businesses that are owned by local governments. There is nothing inherently ‘socialist’ about municipal enterprise. Nonetheless, it’s feasible that certain forms of municipalist enterprise could have a central role in developing a municipalist strategy.

A number of attendees suggested that Nottingham’s Robin Hood Energy would be a good example of this; a municipally owned not-for-profit that looks to reduce fuel costs by not having to provide returns for shareholders. Whilst we should welcome enterprises that reduce consumer costs and provide some degree of decision-making to local authorities, it remains a significant stretch of the imagination to equate this with a socialist project.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for certain types of municipal enterprise within a transformative political program, but we need to ask what precisely is providing the ‘transformative’ potential? Examples such as Wolfhagen’s public-common energy partnership point in this direction, illustrating an innovative form of co-ownership and distributed governance that puts real democratic decision making in the hands of a citizen-consumer-owner cooperative. Cases such as this have the potential to transform our consciousness, with citizens developing new capacities as collaborative decision-makers, and thus playing a role in a larger project of systemic change.

Municipal Socialism

Rather than referring to a particular theory of social change, municipal socialism is more often used as shorthand for a series of actually-existing historical periods. This is usually presented as an overwhelmingly UK-centric history, commonly beginning with the gas-and-water ‘socialism’ of the mid-19th century and ends with the experiments of 1980s Britain. This history is often in danger of falling back into identifying these historical periods as ‘socialist’ due to the presence of municipal enterprise – especially so when we reach back into the 19th Century.

We ought to recall that Joseph Chamberlain, the archetypal mayor of mid-19th Century municipal gas-and-water socialism, believed that the municipality “ought not to intrude where private initiative could already handle the provision of a social good”. Whichever way you choose to frame your understanding of socialism, it probably ought exclude such perspectives.

Furthermore, there are significant differences of experience within certain historical periods. As Hilary Wainwright looked to stress in her contribution, there were many involved in London’s GLC in the 1980s who put a priority on trying to develop a prefigurative and transformative set of practices. This is quite different to a dominant history which paints the projects of the 1980s as being defined by high-levels of local-state spending and periods of direct confrontation with the Thatcher government.

Ultimately, ‘municipal socialism’ has become a form of shorthand to describe periods of heightened redistributive municipal enterprise. Meanwhile, the UK-centric reading of municipal socialism also closes the door on political experiments elsewhere in the world – some of which were introduced by Mike Geddes – many of which may be more closely aligned with what we could call a ‘municipal socialist strategy’. Such reductive readings of history both exclude strategic considerations of how any of this might fit into socialist strategy, whilst simultaneously foreclosing many of the more prefigurative political experiments that also occurred during these periods.

Municipalism

Municipalism should be used to refer to theories of social change that recognize the potential of the municipal scale as a strategically key site for organizing. There is no single theory of ‘municipalism’ – not least because there are a breadth of people within contemporary municipalist movements that are actively experimenting and building theory-in-movement.

There are nonetheless historical precedents for municipalist theory, not least Murray Bookchin, whose concept of Libertarian Municipalism saw the ‘immediate goal is to reopen a public sphere in flat opposition to statism, one that allows for maximum democracy in the literal sense of the term, and to create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally’. Such a position looks to challenge the existing form of the local state, instead positing these institutions as something to be transformed within a broader political agenda.

Whilst I’d wager that many of the participants in the contemporary ‘new municipalist’ movements are likely to agree with such a statement, these movements are not following a predetermined program or strategy – they’re not “Bookchin-ists”. Whilst activists may now be turning to Bookchin and others for inspiration, new theories of ‘municipalism’ are being built through the experiences of these contemporary movements, such that we can see action and theory being produced in tandem.

Given this, it’s not only reasonable – but arguably quite likely – that municipalist perspectives may come to argue that historical periods of municipal socialism actually had very little to do with a ‘municipalist’ theory of change. Furthermore, a municipalist perspective may identify and emphasize different historical examples – from the participatory processes of Montevideo in the late-1980s to the Italian municipalism in the early 20th century – whist looking for different phenomena from within those periods we’ve come to refer to as ‘municipal socialist’.

  1. “The question is not what the local state can do, but what can we do to the local state?”

A fundamental but largely unspoken distinction lay at the heart of this conference, although it was only drawn out in the last session. As Mike Geddes summarised succinctly “the question is not what the local state can do, but what can we do to the local state?”.

This question has profound implications for how we are thinking about municipalist politics. Asking ‘what can the local state do’ tends to reify existing institutions, limiting our spectrum of consideration to the different functions that the existing state-form can undertake. It also understands political agency as resting conclusively with state officials – whether they be elected or civil servants – mistakenly interpreting ‘the state’ as having some form of omnipotence. In a brief nod to the theoretical progressions of the state debate, we should already be beyond thinking of the state as a ‘thing’ that can simply be seized and wielded as a tool of revolutionary change – not least local state institutions.

On other hand, asking ‘what can we do to the local state’ approaches the institutions of the local state as a problem, as a set of social relationships that are part of capitalism itself. Asking “what can we do to the local state?” starts with provocation that we need to fundamentally look to challenge the form of the local state, upsetting its strategic position within the broader reproduction of capitalist social relations. The central concern thus becomes challenging the very form of the state, placing an emphasis on distributing power throughout society and meaningfully de-centering both ownership and decision-making. Furthermore, it demands us to consider who the “we” is that can “do” something to the institutions of the local state, providing a much wider field of social contestation.

So long as we fail to collectively recognize this clear distinction, we will be unable to succinctly think through what it would mean to develop municipalist strategies that function both in, against and beyond the state. We’ll also fail in our attempts to understand contemporary municipalist initiatives if we focus solely on the policies that local authorities such as Barcelona or Naples have implemented, rather than the broader strategy of transformation within which these policies fall.

  1. Where does community wealth building fit?

If there was one more slippage that was threatening to occur – not only within the conference, but potentially within Labour’s community wealth building unit – it was the equation of ‘community wealth building’ with contemporary municipalist strategy. This is not to pass comment on the work that has taken place within Preston or Cleveland, which may well find its place within a broader municipalist theory of change. But there are two questions that need to be raised here:

1) What precisely is it about a community wealth building approach that qualifies it as part of a municipal socialist – let alone municipalist – strategy? How precisely does this sow the seeds for broader transformative change? This is undoubtedly a complex question, yet this is all the more reason not to rest on assumptions (much as we shouldn’t assume that municipal enterprise is somehow socialist).

2) How do we ensure that we don’t come to fetishize community wealth building to the point that it is taken as synonymous with municipalism? There appears a distinct danger of collapsing our focus on to a single approach, at the cost of ignoring the much wider spectrum of progressive municipal initiatives that should also be pursued as part of a transformative strategy.

How we approach, evaluate and extend innovations such as community wealth building will largely be informed by some of the broader strategic considerations outlined above. It may fit within a strategy of developing a common asset-base as part of the development of a broader counter-hegemonic project – similar to how the Jackson-Kush plan positions the role of the solidarity economy – or it may be reduced to a local government budget fix, assessed as a ‘success’ due to an increase in regional GVA.

  1. Onwards

For all these challenges, we have to be thankful that CURA had facilitated a space where these questions could be raised. We remain at the beginning of developing political strategies that are fit for a 21st Century Socialism, where questions of scale and the state remain absolutely central to moving forward. We should look to take these discussions forward and build a clearer understanding of if – and how – municipalist strategies could develop, and what that means for those consumed within the leftward push of Labour. How we balance the ‘realism’ of existing political arrangements with the potential prefigurative power of municipalism is unknown. Thankfully there are dozens of municipalist initiatives out there asking themselves the same question.

Dr Bertie Russell is a research associate at the University of Sheffield’s Urban Institute. His research interests are in participatory democracy; transformational forms of coproduction; the organisation of the commons and post-capitalist transition; and the rise of new forms of urban internationalism. You can find some of his musings here.