Strikepost #1: The Kirkby Rent Strikes (1972)
Let's talk about how a self-organised women's group initiated a 14-month-long strike, and why worker-tenant collaboration is essential.
“There is no doubt that the Kirkby development will be a very attractive one, and the standards of designs, not only for the layout, but in the individual dwellings will be high.” [1]
Ronald Bradbury, Architect and Director of Housing for Liverpool, 1953
“I wonder if they built these flats deliberately to hurt us.” [2]
Resident of Tower Hill (Kirkby), 1974
On this blog, there are never too many ways to say ALAB. In my next post, we’re finally going to talk about methods of housing distribution we could use once we get rid of the landlord’s non-profession. We’re going to explore some options that could work within our current system and others that would have to be part of a socialist economy, but for now, I want to write my first Strikepost.
In the Strikeposts, I want to highlight acts of class struggle from the past, some of them being lesser-known, and talk about why they were or weren’t successful, so that we can have cases to learn from and get motivated to organise ourselves.
In the Liverpool Museum that I visited recently, one small part of the city’s history was dedicated to the Kirkby Rent Strikes of 1972, a strike that I personally had never heard of and now consider to be worth more than a two-sentence stub article on Wikipedia.
The strike was initiated by a group of women after a rent increase was announced for everyone in Kirkby and surrounding areas amidst terrible living conditions and mass unemployment following factory closures. The residents refused to tolerate the landlords and the council driving them to the ground economically, so they got together to fight for their interests. Let’s take a closer look at the situation and how it turned out. For this, we need to understand what Kirkby was like at the time.
Kirkby, formerly a rural parish, was purchased by Liverpool Corporation and then grown and developed specifically to alleviate the housing crisis in the larger city nearby. Since Liverpool was an extremely popular place to work, being a port city and the home of many factories, the workers and their families needed places to stay and the supply of housing in Liverpool itself couldn’t keep up. So the idea of Kirkby was born. Starting as a village of 3000 inhabitants, the city was developed to a population of 50000 within less than 30 years.
People were moved from the slums of Liverpool to these newly constructed apartments promising quality of life and a self-sustaining, socially and economically vibrant, emerging place to be. The fast growth of this new town, however, came with many difficulties - not only did the economically disenfranchised inhabitants not have the necessary resources to make Kirkby the great new community it was at least initially envisioned to become, they were stuck doing necessary repairs on the buildings that were quickly put together with so little care and quality control that things were basically falling apart day by day, piece by piece.
It isn’t hard to understand why people who were moved from the slums into “unfit” apartments outside of their home city couldn’t count on a landlord to take care of these tasks for them. Kirkby residents were low-income people who simply had to take what they could get, so as long as they had some kind of roof over their heads and weren’t clogging up Liverpool looking for a place to stay, the mission of Kirkby was accomplished in the minds of the landlords and city authorities. Not like they could afford lawyers if they had any complaints. Kirkby was essentially another slum painted gold and advertised as the great new city of the future in order to justify the third highest rent raises in any urban district in the country at the time.
In a documentary made about the situation at the time, a young father living in Kirkby describes the mindset of the council as such:
“The ordinary people who live in these dwellings have got no chance whatsoever - so long as we get the rent off them, let them live there: they’re only pigs anyway.” (3)
Many of these cheaply-built, badly maintained houses were family homes, so keeping up with the repairs was mostly left to the women who spent most of their time in them while their husbands went to work in the factories. The women of Kirkby, therefore, were most aware of the absolute state of the cardboard boxes they were made to live in.
When many of the factories that Kirkby residents worked in were shut down in the 1970s, families found themselves even more strapped for cash than they already were, while their standard of living continued to deteriorate. The council, for some reason, considered this a great time to raise everyone’s rents to reflect ‘value by reference to its character, location, amenities and state of repair.’ (4). As you may have gathered by now, the amenities and the state of repair were a complete joke.
By that point, the women of Kirkby had had enough, so they started meeting to talk about their struggle and what they could do to improve their situation. They quickly realised that the bank accounts of the bourgeois are essentially their testicles, the place where it would hurt them the most to be hit. Since the rent collectors refused to listen to their tenants, they would have to feel the pain. And the residents themselves would benefit the most from simply not paying the unjustifiably high rents. So they networked with 20 tenants’ associations to form the THURAG - Tower Hill Unfair Rents Action Group, a group made up of a variety of residents, socialists and communists.
Their method was extremely well organised and militant at the same time. The city was separated into sections in which regular meetings were held to stay connected on the state of the situation and keep everyone motivated to stay engaged and striking, activists followed rent collectors around to prevent them from doing their job and to remind residents that the THURAG was protecting them as they continued to not pay, they picketed the jails to prevent people from being arrested, while the council attempted to break the strike in increasingly harsher ways.
The THURAG was discredited by the council by being branded as a group of thugs that was intimidating people into participating in the strike, the concerns of the women activists were dismissed as “women’s liberation rubbish”, many strikers received court notices, the council contacted their employers to instruct them to cut their wages to make up for their unpaid rent, all of which lead to thousands of people going out to protest on the streets. People were arrested, roadblocks were made to prevent more arrests, prisons were picketed, until the strikers were eventually worn down after 14 months of struggle.
So, how did this strike turn out?
At the end of the day, while the Labour party promised to not implement the increase, they could not manage to keep this promise. There seem to be two main reasons for why the strike failed.
Firstly, the rent increase was a national policy that required a national response, but as the strikes were concentrated in Merseyside, where tenants who couldn’t afford the increase mainly lived, the strikes were too small to have a massive effect. A few riots from a few thousand poor people in a few small cities seemed manageable as long as the rest of the country was accepting the policy quietly.
Secondly, and more importantly, the strikes were initiated and executed by tenants only. There was no national or local support from any unions, since they considered their purpose to be about worker organising exclusively, so the tenants were on their own. This means that while the people of Kirkby and surrounding areas weren’t paying their rent for 14 months, the workers continued going to the factories every day. It would have helped the strike immensely to be combined with industrial resistance. Any type of strike against a national policy is most effective when it affects not only a few landlords’ pockets, but the country’s – or at least the city’s – economy as a whole. Tenants cannot shut down an economy, but workers can. The testicles of the landlords are their bank accounts, yes, but the testicle of the government is the economy. The greatest punishment and pressure point to any government is workers being on strike. Workers in the Bird’s Eye Factory understood this and called for a one day strike, but without any union involvement, all of them quickly lost their jobs, which discouraged people from other factories from trying at all. They were eventually re-hired, but it wasn’t the unions picketing for them to be reinstated, it was the mothers from THURAG joining in support, using their prams to form a blockade.
What we can learn from this strike is that tenant’s and worker’s organisations should be in contact, so that they can work together when it comes to a situation like a nationally relevant rent increase. Both of these groups fundamentally follow the same purpose of advocating for the working class, so they should not be operating completely independently from one another.
No matter the working conditions, workers suffer if they do not have a decent, affordable place to live. Unions should follow or be made aware of the actions that are being planned by tenants’ associations and be accessible and ready to help out with additional worker’s initiatives.
This strike shows that we can make the largest impact by working together in solidarity and by having strong unions that have the power and resources to get involved at the right time. Any type of class struggle can be thought of like a chain. If an important link such as the worker’s union withholds their support, the whole operation will break.
Stories like this should not discourage us from future action. Instead, we should see it as one small defeat within a greater war that we can still win by learning from other people’s attempts of the past.
I’ll end this with a quote from one of the women involved in the strike that was captured in Nick Broomfield’s documentary “Behind The Rent Strike”:
“The tenants themselves on rent strike have gone as far as they can. They’ve done this now for a year. The time has come now to point out that there’s no difference, no split between tenant and worker… the authorities have always used a wedge between us. We’ve got to come together… if a tenant is imprisoned, I think now it’s the turn for the industrial workers to use the weapon that they have, which is strike.” (5)
Recommended Viewing:
Nick Broomfield’s documentary, “Behind the Rent Strike”
Recommended Reading:
the original Tower Hill Women’s Group pamphlet