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In crisis London, the poor are freezing to death

By Elina Pahnke

"It is blackmail to analyze the political attitude of the hungry without at the same time analyzing the hunger", wrote Stig Dagerman in "Tysk höst". And it is politics that makes some go hungry while others always have food on the table.

In a series of articles about food, power and resistance, Elina Pahnke sits down at the table, eats and talks with the premise that hunger is not random - and that everyone should eat.

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

No one can afford to live in central London, so the working people get on the subway, which is allegedly built according to the logic of death: where it should be straight, it curves, because the earth is filled with skeletons piled up during the years of the plague. The underground train carriages creak as if the corpses themselves rose up to beg for mercy. The commuters let the dirge go unnoticed, they have their own problems to think about.

If the price of death is a jerky subway line, the survivors cover all other costs.

This winter, more and more Britons have been forced to choose between being hot and being full.

In the poorly insulated houses, people simply turn off the heat because they can't afford to pay the bills. A pensioner recently froze to death in the small town of Bury, after spending the coldest months of the year in a frozen house.

The cold here eats into the skin and spreads like a fact. Even in the heated houses, the temperature is somewhere around a reasonable 18 degrees, enough to get through the day but not enough to completely shake off the outdoor air in March. Last year, the electricity company Eon responded to the high electricity bills by sending home socks to households. What the bloody hell, replied an angry customer on Twitter.

In George Orwell's novel "Down with Paris and London", which is now being published in a new edition, the main character drifts around London in the 30s without a penny in his pocket and tries to find somewhere to sleep at night. In the shelters the poor are so close to each other that they fan each other's faces with their breath, but in the church you can always get a cup of tea. Yet the homeless avoid the place, where prayer and confession are required to warm their throats.

Those who do not belong to the ever-growing group of Britons who are evicted or apply to food banks are met instead by empty shelves in grocery stores. Customers are now being asked to ration

Now the churches have once again begun to open up to those in need. On the Internet there is a map of all the places that offer a hot moment. At St John's Church in the Borough of Hoxton, they distribute soup and bread to the hungry every Wednesday. Here there is no counter demand for the lunch, you don't have to pray to God but maybe you ask for money, because here you can also get a contribution to pay your electricity bill.

On the other side of town, in south-west London, the cold comes knocking on a Friday around lunchtime. An autistic man in his sixties is to be evicted today, after his landlord died and the heir decided to sell the house.

The bailiff has blocked the entrance to his basement apartment. They have turned up before the allotted time and when activists from the London Tenants Union, a self-organized tenants' union, turn up to protest the eviction, it is already too late.

No one is allowed in and the soon-to-be-homeless tenant doesn't want to go out either, he has lived here for 15 years and is terrified of the uniformed group that knocked on his door.

A neighbor passes by and asks what's going on. The activists, who can do nothing but witness how everything is taken from the man - the roof over his head, the home he created for himself in a time of crisis - explain what is going on.

- So terrible, says the neighbor.

Those who do not belong to the ever-growing group of Britons who are evicted or apply to food banks are met instead by empty shelves in grocery stores. Customers are now being asked to ration.

- What's the point of being the world's sixth largest economy if you can't get hold of a tomato? exclaims Marcus Barnett during a train journey to Wimbledon.

He is the press officer for the CWU, the British Communications Union, and is to introduce me to Greg Charles, a postman and union representative. If Greg Charles eats tomato, it is as a flavoring in the lunch cup of instant noodles that he enjoys at nine in the morning.

- Can't be cheaper, one pound and ten pence.

He has worked at Royal Mail for almost 30 years, so long that he remembers when postmen still had their own canteen and the afternoon was broken up by several breaks. Now the working day instead consists of a single long drive without access to a toilet, and the canteen has been replaced with a regular room where the workers can buy their own food. There will be McDonalds for many, or sandwiches and noodles if your name is Greg Charles.

Ethan Saunders speaks during a lunch meeting about the importance of questioning strike breakers and bringing more colleagues into the movement. "We must be as militant as life itself," he says.

PHOTO: ELINA PAHNKE

Over the past year, prices for food, petrol, public transport, electricity, gas, loans, entertainment and accommodation have gone up.

But there is one price tag that hasn't changed significantly, where the more expensive expenses aren't offset by higher revenue: The cost of labor.

This summer, the transport workers and subway conductors braked their train cars.

Soon after, the postmen stopped their work.

As long as only the most combative unions went on strike, it was relatively easy for the media and politicians to smear them. You could say, for example, that they had no popular support, or you could do as presenter Susanna Reid on the television program Good Morning Britain, who asked Mick Lynch, leader of the transport union, whether it was really reasonable for conductors to have higher salary when other professional groups toiled more for less. Look at the nurses, said Susanna Reid, why should you be paid more than them?

Here, even the ambulance is conditional: 500 people died last year because it did not arrive in time

Then the nurses went on strike.

And then the teachers, civil servants, ambulance drivers and large parts of the private sector.

- I am fifty, have worked since I was sixteen. I have never seen so many people strike at the same time. It's a movement, but at the same time it's very moving, says Greg Charles and continues:

- Everyone feels exactly the same. Those paying for the crisis did not create it.

He coughs as he talks, a dry cough that never seems to go away.

All London's lungs seem to have been punctured this winter, but a year after the corona restrictions were lifted, no one reacts to the eternal rose land anymore.

Instead, the pandemic reminds us in other ways.

Polly Smythe, a journalist who covers labor market issues for the left-wing platform Novara Media, describes how many jobs became more difficult during the shutdown. Once it opened up, and everything was no longer life and death, many employers continued their profiteering and overworked workers who were already exhausted from running the country.

- The managers got used to getting more out of their workers and wanted to continue running their workplaces that way.

There have been strikes in the past, but they have not been linked to the political movement now taking place in the British public. Now the working people speak with the same hungry mouth about the consequences of the austerity policy: In the last year, the number of children living in poverty has doubled. Every fifth tenant is behind with the rent. The country has more food banks than ever before.

This in a country where everything is conditional; where school lunches are only offered to children whose parents are below a certain income, where university studies are reserved for the well-off or those who can mortgage themselves for the rest of their lives. Here, even the ambulance is conditional: 500 people died last year because it did not arrive in time. At the same time, the shareholders are laughing all the way to the bank – the ten richest percent own 230 times more than the ten poorest.

The price increases must therefore be understood as the last straw in a permanent crisis: poverty has not arisen now, but the understanding of the underlying causes has changed.

Teachers in the borough of Islington demonstrate for better conditions and higher wages.

Teachers in the borough of Islington demonstrate for better conditions and higher wages.

PHOTO: ELINA PAHNKE

The government has responded to the cost crisis - by introducing new anti-union laws. Among other things, they have proposed that workplaces must be staffed at a minimum level even during strikes – a proposal that makes total work stoppages impossible. They have also ensured that the striking workers can be replaced by entrants from staffing companies. But even though the conservative Rishi Sunak's government wanted to be tough, it has slowly had to back down and negotiate with parts of the trade union movement.

What at first looked like industry-specific protests have, during the winter, been shaped into common demands. Unions and opposition politicians have come together under the slogan: Enough is enuogh.

Labor MP Zarah Sultana is one of those behind the campaign.

- We are organizing working people against what must be seen as one of the biggest attacks on our living standards ever. The strikes are a response to the richest continuing to extract profits. That we have a record number of billionaires. This is an anger that has been building up for a long time, says Zarah Sultana. She is an hour north of London, outside a workplace that made huge profits when society shut down.

Next to her is Darren Westwood.

- If Jeff Bezos pulls out a map and Googles Meriden, and looks a little southeast, he'll see Coventry. This city is famous for many things, the riots against Thatcher in 1990 started here. And now we are known to be the first Amazon warehouse to go on strike in the UK, says Darren Westwood.

He has worked at Amazon for three and a half years and this morning he got up at three to take the morning shift on the picket line. Darren Westwood is surrounded by GMB union representatives and warehouse workers warming themselves by a fire barrel.

- I couldn't sleep more than an hour last night, this is like Christmas Eve for me. These people are the greatest heroes I have ever met.

Amazon workers are demanding that their current £10.50 an hour wage be increased to £15, but to be able to establish the union in the warehouse they need to organize more people. On this day, they stop all cars that are entering their shift.

- I ask them if they want more money. And if they say no, I say okay, what charity should we donate your money to when we win? says Darren Westwood, smiling.

Back in the capital, the postmen, who used to work in their breaks, have started gathering around early lunches in what is no longer a food canteen to plan how to keep the movement alive. The teachers, a professional category that previously withdrew to strike, also have a meeting in an association room where lunch sandwiches are offered.

- We have to stop being so British. It may feel uncomfortable to question your colleagues when they break the strike. But you know what's also uncomfortable?

Ethan Saunders addresses the teachers gathered in the room.

- Being poor.

The teachers have just demonstrated through the streets of Islington, chanting about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, currently hated by most, if they even remember who runs the country. The teachers clap and sing: Oh Rishi you're so tight, you're so tight you make us strike, hey Rishi! and are accompanied by the double deckers honking and cheering as they pass. Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn is here to address the crowd.

- Rishi Sunak believes that your salary drives inflation. But wait... you haven't had a pay rise!

I ask Corbyn how he would have explained the situation in Britain if an alien came to visit, or perhaps just a Swedish journalist, and he replies that the government refuses to deal with British inequality.

- The only way for the workers to at least keep pace with the cost increases is to go from words to actions.

It is March in a country that has found a common language for resistance.

In Sweden, at the same time, the same cost crisis and the same union negotiations are found.

Right now the agreement movement is underway, where the leaders of the labor unions, like the British unions, could have said that now is enough.

Instead, Veli-Pekka Säikkälä, contract secretary at IF Metall, says the following: "We don't believe in any idea of being compensated for high inflation".

Kommunal's contract secretary Johan Engelsog agrees with the claim that it is the low-paid who have contributed to the crisis rather than their managers, and believes that "the labor market partners need to take joint responsibility not to drive up inflation".

Everything must be allowed to go up in price, except the cost of labor. Maybe we should stop being so Swedish about it and gather at our workplaces over a lunch, this potentially mobilizing meal that doesn't have to be about what the lunch box contains, and ask ourselves why our union representatives are selling us out at a bargain price.

And perhaps Säikkälä and Engelsog would have to settle down next to London's working people on a typical evening, puffing away over a beer in a bar around the corner from Brick Lane, the street famous for its Indian food.

Here a man sits and plays the piano, flips through the sheet music on his iPad, plays a few notes and looks around to see if the guests are singing along. When they don't, he quickly switches to something more familiar. A man with tattoos on his face wishes for a song: "Folsom prison blues". His bottom wiggles back and forth in time with the keys. London has turned into a common chorus.

"I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car. They're probably drinkin' coffee and smoking big cigars.

But I knew I had it coming, I know I can't be free.

But that train keeps on rolling. And that's what tortures me.”

Outside, the trains will soon stop again, when the conductors once again go on strike.

The city exists for a moment, as something more than material accumulation.

The piano man has the audience with him, and finally plays a song from start to finish.