Meg Bishop On The Housing Crisis and Organising
The organiser and academic discusses the UK housing crisis, the politics of activism and intersectionality.
In this conversation with Meg Bishop, we touch on the housing crisis, the Government’s response to it, activism, how things change and much more. We chatted earlier in August and since then there’s been an incredible new development in this area - Scottish Government’s pledge to introduce rent controls. This would be transformative for so many people who rent, myself included, and it is fair to say it’s only at this stage of development due to Living Rent’s tireless work (which we discuss below).
Meg Bishop is a PhD Student in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Her research considers the intersections of housing and class struggle in tenant and community organising in Scotland. She works with Living Rent, with whom she has been a member since 2018, in order to explore these ideas in practice.
I’m curious about the way you talk about housing. If you are meeting someone who is unaware of everything happening with housing in Scotland/UK at the moment, how do you bring them into it? What’s the entryway?
I guess it depends. I try to explain just how serious the housing crisis is - how much the rents have gone up and wages have stagnated. Housing is not just getting more expensive, it’s getting more unaffordable. It’s costing more and more as a percentage of what we are earning. I’ll usually ask people what percentage of their earnings goes on housing alone. For me, it’s about 50% which is on the UN definition of housing poverty. One thing that I find really useful for opening up more critical debates about housing is something that I borrowed from my PhD supervisor and lecturer Hamish Kallin. He asks us to think what are houses for vs what are houses worth. What are they for? You might say a secure place where you can have friends over, build a relationship in, cook, have hobbies, build a family if you are so inclined. Those things are mostly universal, the responses to it would be quite similar. But if you ask someone what a house is worth you will get a lot of different answers and they will be so detached from any of those things. So you start thinking about the use value vs. the exchange value of a house and how they are completely divorced from one another.
This speaks to the unevenness in that relationship between landlord and tenant. While one side’s relationship with a house is simply a financial investment, to the other the relationship is about survival - it’s literally the roof over their heads.
We live in a society now where the exchange value is prioritised over the use value. David Harvey is very good too, he wrote about these contradictions.
How would you rate the political response to the housing crisis at the moment? There’s an eviction ban and temporary rent cap in Scotland, is that enough? What are the shortcomings of it?
I can answer that very succinctly with my own story. I received an eviction notice from my previous flat in April. So, despite the so-called eviction ban and temporary rent cap, I was evicted and had to move to a new place in May. In the process of moving my rent has doubled. So, if you start a new tenancy (because of a flatmate moving out, for instance) then the cap doesn’t apply. The eviction ban is similar to what we had in the pandemic, it’s more a moratorium (a stop gap). It is only stopping evictions that have been through the tribunal process. Many people don’t make it that far because it’s a long drawn out process and depending on the grounds for eviction there’s little chance you will win. And that’s if you make it to the tribunal, many people leave after receiving notice - illegal evictions were proliferating during the pandemic. So, the eviction ban isn’t actually an eviction ban. It only stops a very small portion of evictions.
"It’s a bit cliche to say agitate, educate, organise. But it is really important."
You’ve done a lot of organising around housing and tenant’s rights which I think exposes you to a lot of the on-the-ground struggle about this. What kinds of insights have you picked up from that?
There’s an opening up of how I think of protest and direct action. Resistance isn’t just this form of protest you see on the news. There’s a great quote from Naomi Klein: “resistance is about [...] building connections and talking to your neighbour. Things that make other forms of resistance more possible”. What stands out for me are the differences between mobilising and organising. It’s not just about these visible forms of action, there’s so much behind the scenes that makes them possible.
I feel like a lot of the activism I see nowadays is about raising awareness, but there’s less of an understanding of other elements like education, lobbying, etc…
Raising awareness can be useful, particularly when we think of it as more than just the tokenistic version of it. Raising awareness can mean political education that is meaningful and radical, it can mean lobbying… Unions, campaign groups all need to circulate knowledge that is accessible to people. But activism isn’t just theatre. There are parts of it that are, but organising is just as useful because that’s how you build long standing power. It’s a bit cliche to say agitate, educate, organise. But it is really important.
You and Abi O’Connor wrote a really interesting piece about the work of women and non-binary people in organising. Could you define what you mean by activist housework?
It’s the sort of behind-the-scenes work people don’t often think about. It always seemed to be of secondary importance in Marxist literature or not even acknowledged at all. So, for us it was important to refer to that undervalued labour that is part of sustaining a movement. Things as simple as minute-taking, which can limit how effectively you can participate in the discussion. We found that overwhelmingly in the spaces that we have been part of, these have been tasks undertaken by women and non-binary people.
Right. And it’s the kind of role that is not necessarily acknowledged when responsibilities are being shared. It’s a bit of a contradiction, right? These are lefty places operating and yet they can operate with reactionary dynamics.
Completely. And I feel like there’s a very gendered resistance to structures that might be put in place to counteract that.
Have you come across Barbara Foley’s article on intersectionality? Some of her arguments can be summarised in the quote: “Although intersectionality can usefully describe the effects of multiple oppressions, I propose, it does not offer an adequate explanatory framework for addressing the root causes of social inequality in the capitalist socio economic system”. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the way we speak about intersectionality in the context of organising, or the housing crisis? What’s your take on Foley’s argument?
I think myself and Foley think of intersectionality in different ways. I don’t consider organising for gendered liberation or racialised liberation to be at the expense of class struggle. I’m not sure the original literature does that and I don’t think it was supposed to. It was merely to say that these struggles are more interconnected than we think. But that literature has gone further into addressing that. Exploitation and oppression in the capitalist economic system tells us that some lives are valued more than others. Maybe sexism, racism, homophobia are not root causes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not tools in which social inequality can then be structured. I was thinking about some reading I did years ago on economic and extra-economic forces. For instance, women entering the labour market thanks to the women’s movement. Or, the abolition of slavery. These open up new populations to be proletarianised, which opens them to more traditional exploitation, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile.
That’s a very good point.
The article was interesting but it didn’t sit very well with me. It’s important we don’t lose sight of class struggle, but I think class struggle cannot be separated from racialised struggle, gendered struggle, etc…
Something I like to ask interviewees is ‘how do things change’? In the context of housing in the UK, what needs to happen for the tide to start turning? What’s your theory of change when it comes to this?
We need to be organising more. At the moment it feels so politically tense, so many people are a couple of paychecks away from losing their home. The cost of living crisis is both horrific and a great opportunity to show people how stark inequality is - and housing is a big part of that. We need to grab the bull by the horns and say to people that this is awful and you are not going through it alone so let's build something together to take it back. My theory of change is that housing is how so much money is made and stored in this country, it provides an exciting avenue for class struggle. The people who don’t have control over their housing have the opportunity to build the power we need. It’s not gonna be an immediate revolution, we need to keep chipping away and housing provides a good opportunity for that.
It feels like housing is so bad at the moment, people will inevitably be pushed to join a movement like this.
John Holloway’s Hope in Hopeless Times talks about this. Things are so incredibly precarious on a knife’s edge, and that is scary… but it’s also scary for the elite. How much more can they raise interest rates before something big happens? They’re rightly aware they might be one decision away from losing all legitimacy and power they might have. Change is not wishful thinking, it’s active. It comes about with hope and action, and when the work to bring it about is shared equitably.
What’s been keeping you inspired lately?
At the moment I’ve been hiding under blankets playing The Ocarina of Time.
Oh my god, I have such fond memories of that game.
It’s so good, man… I watch Zelda lore videos to fall asleep. But to take it away from Nintendo… Works of science fiction are really useful for me, like Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven). I love when she talks about love needing to be worked on and constantly remade like bread, which is also something you could say about being part of a union - it constantly needs shaping, it’s an act of hope. I’m always inspired by the people around me - Hamish Kallin, Kirsteen Paton and Tom Slater. They’re always pushing me for more. My fellow union members - Emma Saunders, Living Rent’s national organiser who does so much to keep it all together (not to individualise her, I’m sure she’d hate this) and is always someone who I look to for inspiration. And just Living Rent in general, discussion of rent controls would be nowhere near where they are without it. More work needs to be done, but even having rent controls in the conversation is a massive achievement. It’s like the quote from Selma James: “We’ve come a long way baby. Power to the sisters and therefore to the class”.
OK - last question: If I left this Newsletter to you in my inheritance and you were responsible for finding and interviewing one last person, who would it be?
I’d love to hear more from Lola Olufemi who wrote Feminism, Interrupted. It’s one of my favourite books I read in the last couple of years.
