In December 1967, the Tory GLC announced a 70% rent increase for its 240,000 GLC tenants; this rent increase was to be imposed in four instalments over a period of three years, the first to be effective from September 1968. Taking advantage of the delay, many thousands of tenants began to organise themselves: first into Tenants' associations on individual estates; then into wider coordinating bodies-the GLC Tenants' Action Committee, and the Tower Hamlets Federation-to which subsequently formed associations became affiliated. In September 1968, 20,000 tenants withheld this first Last summer, some 10,000 tenants who were still refusing to pay up, decided to question the legality of the increase, since grounds for a case against the GLC had been established. Individual writs were taken out by tenants against the GLC and slowly the clumsy machinery of the law came into action. Hopes were high. They stood a fifty/fifty chance of gaining a victory: a chance for legal victory in their struggle against rent increases. delaying tactic; the case did not reach court until December 1969 and final judgement was not passed until the case went through the Court of Appeal in January of this year-a delay of six months since the issue of the writ. The GLC also delayed: awaiting the result of the court battle, they announced that there would be no evictions for those who withheld rent increases, until after Christmas. They continued, however, to send notices to quit-in their hundreds.
The Tenants reacted by forming a Flying Squad: 1,200 volunteers on call, prepared to resort to violence in preventing eviction, should the attempt be made.
But then the delaying tactic began to have its effect; the first eviction attempt would probably not be made before the court case-but when would the court case come up? And when it did-would they win? Yes-it was possible. They could win the battle legally. And then they would not have to take militant action against evictions-at least, not those in connec tion with paying the first increase.
Establishment delaying tactics made the court case central to the Tenants' struggle; it gradually became the focus, and then the fulcrum of the fight. Attitudes shifted; at first the Tenants had seen a slim chance of victory in the court case, which would be only a temporary victory anyway; but as the months passed thev came to depend on the result or une caseit would determine the future tone and direction of their struggle. The delay sapped morale; many tenants banked on legal victory for the continuation of their struggle sult was a hard blow. In the last fortnight a number of Tenants' Associations have voted to pay up the rent increase that they've been withholding for eighteen months. Today, Feb. Ist, between 1,000 and 1,500 are probably still withholding. Meanwhile, the Government, County Hall, and the London press, smirkthey think that this upstart tenant movement is crumbling.
They are wrong. In spite of many paying up their arrears, the movement is still strong; and its strength, ironically, lies in its declared "nonpolitical" nature.
The Labour Government, feebly professing to represent the Working Classes, has shown many too tenants all too harshly that politicsestablishment party politics-is nothing more than manipulation from above. They feel that they cannot trust the politicians in their role as manipulators; working from outside, they have no immediate experience of the particular prob- tee has now become the United Tenants' Aclems that the tenants face; moreover, their motives as politicians are always "doubtful".
The attitude of the Labour Party as political manipulators of tenants has been typical in the way it has granted and offered concessions. These concessions have been simultaneously electioneering gambits and attempts to contain the growth of the movement, to keep it passive, so that it did not threaten Labour's class identity. The first of these concessions was granted by Greenwood, the Minister of Housing; under pressure from a violent demonstration outside his house, he vetoed the Tory GLC from imposing a second rent increase in July 1969. Inhas allowed it. And of course the Labour minority at County Hall have jumped on this bandwagon; selling themselves for the GLC elections in April, they have promised that a Labour GLC will cancel the March rent increase, or those due in 1971.
The Labour Party also try to manipulate at more local levels, where as councillors or party members they attempt to control or direct Tenants' organisations.
For these reasons the GLC Tenants* movement is "non-political". They realise that they cannot trust "politicians"-whether they are Labour, Tory, Liberal, Communist, or extraparliamentary left or right. A Tenants movement must be run, the decisions taken, by the tenants themselves; and this is why the GLC Tenants are still strong-they have faith in themselves, in their own self-determination.
What was the GLC Tenants' Action Committion Committee. London Borough Council tenants, facing rent increases, have formed local associations and are fighting the same battle as the GLC tenants within the same larger organisation-the UTAC. Communications between London Council tenants and Council tenants in the rest of the country are improving-speakers are exchanged, etc. The movement is growing. It is part of a national tendency in the working classes at the moment: rejection of the Labour Party and the bureaucratised trade unions as effective political working class organisations in favour of self-determining, grass roots action.