Jane Wood never thought of herself as political. The 45-year-old has voted precisely once in her entire life – just to celebrate turning 18. (Tory, since you ask, “because my parents did”.) But this weekend, the mother of two did something more radical than any manifesto or TV debate: she took back the east London home she’d been evicted from last month.

Needless to say, Wood looks nothing like an occupier. Her fringe is never askew, the smile’s always on, and she’s ever ready with a “brilliant!”. Yet within a few weeks, this middle-aged woman has gone from not having a roof over her head to the centre of what her council terms “an illegal occupation”. The story of how that happened tells you more about our politics than anything you’ll hear this election.

Why I’m occupying a boarded-up east London council house | Jasmin Stone Read more

It begins last October, when the Department for Work and Pensions summoned her to one of its famously unsatisfactory medical assessments. Wood has had mental health problems for more than two decades and is being treated for bipolar depression. Yet after a 15-minute tick-box exercise, she lost her benefits. Ask her what happened and even now she’s baffled. “He just asked me things like ‘How do you feel on a scale of 0 to 3?’ and at the time I was on a high.” What she didn’t tell the assessor was about the days “I feel like jumping in front of a bus”.

Just like that, the cash she relied on to pay the rent was withdrawn. Never comfortably off, Wood had had occasional trouble with making the rent, but now she and her 14-year-old were scraping by on child benefit and tax credits. Over the next few months, she missed payment after payment on the two-bed, top-floor council flat in Stratford, east London. Her depression getting worse, Wood just curled up into the foetal position and ignored everything: council letters, phone calls, visits. She didn’t even turn up for her court hearing in January.

What you’re seeing here is how quickly and easily someone in modern Britain can fall through the cracks. A Tory-led government is hellbent on cutting social security; a Labour council needs its rent. And a 45-year-old woman, too ashamed even to admit to relatives that she’s on benefits, loses her home of 20 years. By the time her parents found out, and got together the money to pay the arrears, the council refused to let her stay. (Newham denies being made a clear offer by Wood’s parents.)

When Wood and her daughter were finally turfed out in late March, they left within 10 minutes, taking three carrier bags, with Easter eggs and clothes. At our first meeting, Wood was sleeping on her elder daughter’s sofa and had just come back from a meeting with a housing officer, who advised that her options now included renting in Southend, 35 miles from home.

However sad, this story is by now a familiar one to me. I’ve written about it in these pages recently as “privatised despair”: how individuals struggle by, even as the social settlement they rely upon – welfare, a functioning jobs market – is dismantled. But here comes the twist: because Wood then reoccupied her own flat.

She did so with the help of the Focus E15 housing activists, a local group not much more than a year old. As with Wood, these were unpolitical single mothers who were suddenly forced to get political when threatened with eviction from their hostel and advised they’d have to scatter to Birmingham or Manchester.

After a series of direct actions – storming council offices, holding impromptu parties on the premises of their housing association – all 29 managed to stay in Newham. Rather than pipe down afterwards, they began campaigning more broadly for social housing and took over a flat in an otherwise empty council estate. Despite court action and the water being cut off, they left of their own accord – and wrested both an apology and concessions from Newham’s mayor, Robin Wales.

Ever since, whenever I’ve visited any housing estate facing the wrecking ball, the first people residents want to talk about aren’t Cameron or Miliband, but Focus E15. Those young mothers went through a struggle similar to theirs – and won. One of Focus E15’s leaders, Jasmin Stone, reckons her group gets hundreds of requests for help from community movements across the country.

None of us started out radical, but we have no other choice

At the same time, there has been a wave of occupations of housing estates facing redevelopment. In February, it was the Guinness Estate in Brixton; just a few days ago, protesters called off their occupation of the Aylesbury Estate near Elephant and Castle. Demonstrators are still gathered in a house in Barnet, backing on to the Sweets Way estate. And this weekend, Wood and Focus E15 took back her old flat. The local councils invariably blame these protests on “outsiders”, but in each case the occupations have the support and sometimes the involvement of residents.

These occupations represent the answer to a double failure, of both state and market. Wood’s case is a perfect example: she was mugged of her benefits by Westminster, pushed out of her home by Newham and then ejected into a London housing market that has nothing she can afford. And so, she became what Sam Middleton of Focus E15 calls a Made Activist: “None of us started out radical, but we have no other choice.”

All this is reminiscent of the Spanish reoccupations, where protesters from Madrid to Andalusia began taking over homes that had been foreclosed during the mortgage crisis. The slogans they used then – These Homes Need People – prefigure the ones deployed by London protesters. One of the motifs of this campaign is how the voters have been left behind by the political class. Miliband, Cameron and Clegg have literally left behind their voters and now appear only in empty hangars for exhaustively staged photo ops. That is not the story you find in the occupations. Here, people are way ahead of mainstream politicians in their sophistication. In Barnet this weekend, kids ran in and out while their parents compared their situation to the enclosures of the 18th century.

This is a world of politics beyond the main parties and unions, but it is getting organised. The direct action practised by Focus E15 hasn’t been focus-grouped, but my God does it resonate. It can also be shut down. As I write this, police have stormed Wood’s flat and arrested 20-year-old Jasmin Stone – on what charges it is unclear. But here’s the thing: politicians and pundits would have you believe that this election is a choice between Cameron and Miliband, between outrage and disappointment. What Jane Wood shows is that if you push even the most unpolitical person into a tight-enough corner, she’ll reject all the choices offered her.

UPDATE

Yesterday afternoon, as this piece was being completed and edited, the police and council officers stormed the occupation of Jane Wood’s flat. Their arrival was tweeted in real time by Focus E15, in a jumble of alarming images.





In the early confusion, the first report I received was that everyone in the flat had been arrested – but in fact only Focus E15’s Jasmin Stone was taken away, to Waltham Forest custody centre, where about 40 shouting supporters gathered outside.

Newham council worked with the police on forcibly entering the flat and carting off Jasmin Stone

Two things stand out here. First, Newham council worked with the police on forcibly entering the flat and carting off Jasmin Stone. The council confirms that it sent officers, although it won’t reveal how many. This crackdown was co-ordinated by police and the local authority.

Second, yesterday’s arrest is very different from what councils or developers normally do in these situations, which is: wait a bit, file a possession order and let the courts take care of it. That’s what happened in Sweets Way in Barnet. Perhaps Newham didn’t want to wait and allow Jane Wood’s flat to become a site of protest, as happened with the previous Focus E15 occupation. Perhaps Jasmin Stone was picked out as a kind of ringleader.

Perhaps I should also observe here that the woman police hauled off yesterday is 20 and the mother of a toddler. I don’t know of anything she’s done wrong – except actively protest about the way that her home city is being turned into an enclave for the rich, with the middle and working classes flung out to the far suburbs.

What’s been circulated on social media is that Stone was formally charged with squatting. That’s not quite right: her solicitors say she was interviewed on suspicion of squatting, then released. Even that mystifies lawyers I’ve spoken to, if she’d not been living at the address. She was released on police bail last night.

My initial understanding was that there could be no such police action if Wood herself had been inside the flat. Her status as a tenant reoccupying a flat that had gone empty since she moved out gave her much greater legal protection (housing lawyers, say if I’ve got this wrong). Only, as the arrests were happening yesterday afternoon, Wood was at Newham council, where she’d been invited to discuss housing options. Did the council plan things this way?



Focus E15 housing activist arrested on suspicion of squatting Read more

Spokespeople at the council yesterday said they wanted to treat Wood “compassionately” and get her temporary accommodation. Yet for the past three weeks she and her 14-year-old daughter, Raven, have been homeless. As I reported above, officers last week advised her to think about moving to Southend. One weekend’s occupation, and a bit of media interest, and she’s suddenly front of the queue.

A lot more will come out in Stone’s case, but let me draw this hasty conclusion. Housing activism does work. It means Jane Wood may soon have a roof over her head again. In Barnet activists have worked with residents to get them housed by the council. These are all partial victories: temporary contracts for people to be housed in London’s private rental sector. But they’re a hell of a lot better than kipping on someone’s couch and not knowing where you’ll be next week.

Meanwhile, up in the stratosphere, the Tories today pledged to sell off more social housing at a steep discount – while Labour yesterday reannounced its campaign pledge to get 200,000 new homes every year, with no detail on how they’ll be financed or built, or whether they’ll be social, private or even just affordable.

You tell me who’s got the better grip on this crisis: the SW1 brigade, or the people at ground level who are being criminalised for pointing out there’s a crisis.