The MUHAMMAD HAQUE interview. Carole Swords, Housing rights campaigner [3]

HOW THEY ARE MAKING PEOPLE POOR in the East END of London:

The Housing Nightmare and the central failures by the local Tower Hamlets Council.

The MUHAMMAD HAQUE interview. 

Carole Swords, Housing rights campaigner [3]

1015 Hrs GMT

London Monday 08 October 2012.

"It is only affordable if you can afford it!"

That is how Carole Sword summed up the farcical slogan that successive stooges of anti-social housing market have peddled it.

In the East End of London where Carole Swords has been a campaigner for housing rights, "Nothing is affordable", she told me yesterday when we met in Brick Lane.

"Nothing at all" is affordable. Carole Swords stressed.  

In the context of the nightmare housing crisis that local Councils and the CONDEM Collusion are creating.

The Housing crisis is in the cuts for everyone to see. The policy causing the crisis, for which Carole Swords blamed the "New Labour Party" is "destroying communities", she said.

"Its breaking up families. There';s families that 've lived in the East End [London] for generations. And there's children, grandchildren [being] shipped out [of their neighbourhoods, their communities]…"

Carole Swords didn't say it. She didn't have to say it but she was in effect echoing what had already been going on via Tower Hamlets Council for years.

She was in fact updating the demand for the due delivery of the legal duty by the local Tower Hamlets council.

Which is exactly what had been the demand in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, a year after the then SDP "alliance"  came into power in Tower Hamlets for the first time [1986], there was the most almighty row over  the SDP group's leaked proposal for shipping out  of the East End mostly homeless and low income families, the majority of whom just happened to be from the Bangladeshi community.

So outraged was the local community that in one action, activists and campaigners symbolically occupied for a very short time the then Tower Hamlets Council Chamber based in Bethnal Green in protest against the SDP Council's plan to put homeless families either on barges or send them away from their communities and neighbourhoods and far away from and out of London itself.

A good quartet of a century later in October 2012 we are back on campaign mode for housing and human rights and as against the local Tower Hamlets Council and we are in for a long haul, by the looks of things.

It is more than ironic that Carole Swords remains "banned" by Tower Hamlets Council.

That status of being probably the ONLY BANNED CAMPAIGNER is most likely to receive a boost in the near future.

Why? 

Because OTHER activists may indeed decide to exercise their democratic right and start attending Tower Hamlets Council meetings in some numbers and they may find the Council's relevant "proceedings" to be unacceptably anti-social. This may cause new outrage and that may in turn cause some of the campaigners to express the outrage by loud and noisy protests. Which may "induce" Isabella Freeman, the Council's "assistant chief executive [legal]" and the "Monitoring Officer" to some more "banning" of protesters!

[To be continued]