Independent party Arise has chosen candidates with “a track record of activism” to stand in Harrow’s local election. And they’re hoping to hold the council to account in particular for its housing and financial failures.

Arise — ‘We’ve never stopped campaigning’

Pamela Fitzpatrick, who’s running for Arise in the Marlborough ward, told the Canary that:

People are so disillusioned with politicians. When you first knock, it’s ‘no, no, no, no, no’ or ‘I never vote, you’re all corrupt’.

But she and others in Arise have stressed how different they are:

by talking about the campaigns we’ve been involved in. So once people hear that and they remember, ‘oh yeah, you were involved in that, you’re not just turning up out of nowhere’…

a lot of us are known for what we do.

After standing in the 2024 general election as an independent, Fitzpatrick said:

we’ve never stopped campaigning, and on a whole range of things.

Since registering Arise last year, though, they focused on what wards they would stand council candidates in. And Fitzpatrick explained that:

There had to be evidence of being a socialist, and they ought to have a track record of activism.

Despite being a largely Conservative borough, she added:

In some parts, you would not believe the level of poverty that people are living in, and they’re desperate. They’ve heard it all before, you know, ‘Labour will make things better’. When we knock at the door, they are so angry at things, that their lives haven’t been made better – they’ve been made a lot worse, generally.

Housing specifically is a big issue, she insisted.

Harrow’s housing crisis and local activism

Saying that most parties only reach out to residents at election time and are “not rooted in the community”, Fitzpatrick asserted that:

We are there all the time. We had a housing campaign. Harrow’s got such a housing crisis, because it’s got the lowest level of council homes or social housing of any London borough. So people who are on poor and middle incomes are in the private sector, and it’s too expensive. But lots of the housing is of really poor quality, you know, damp, toxic mould and everything.

They keep building more and more tower blocks that nobody can afford to live in, and they say they justify it on the basis this is to meet the housing crisis and they say it will have X amount percentage affordable, but of course the affordable’s not affordable…

Lots of these tower blocks are lying empty because they’ve been marketed abroad as foreign investments… Despite everybody saying the Council is broke, it does have considerable borrowing power, so they could buy these blocks and actually turn them into council housing, which would then generate income for them and, again, solve some problems.

And Fitzpatrick was part of community efforts to deal with this situation. She continued by saying:

We started a campaign about 4 years ago that became known as Tesco Towers, and that brought together loads of residents, all different political colours and everything, who didn’t want this…

And by the end of that 3 years, we’d stopped that development going through, through a mixture of petitions, going to council meetings, knocking on doors, talking to people protests outside Tesco’s… Tesco’s threatened to arrest us, we got a lot of publicity about that. We never saw sight nor sound of a councillor or MP, ever. Nobody there.

The opposition to the Tesco Towers development centred around issues like lack of affordable housing, potential health risks, and the impact on local infrastructure due to the large scale of the project.

Another “really easily achievable” step the council could take, Fitzpatrick highlighted, is to “prosecute rogue landlords”. This very rarely happens, but:

If they prosecute rogue landlords, that makes them money, probably between £7,000 and £10,000 each time they prosecute a rogue landlord. When a rogue landlord illegally evicts somebody, the council has to pick up the bill, usually, and house the family. They never then go for damages against that landlord, which they could…

This would send a message to landlords to actually do something about the quality of their accommodation, and make money for the council.

Stop putting people’s tax money into private pockets

Fitzpatrick also talked about the money the council wastes unnecessarily in order to line private pockets. On the topic of housing, for example:

When people are homeless and they go to the council, they are placed in hotels or nightly accommodation which is paid at a higher rate than normal rents, for example. It’s people making such a lot of money out of homelessness and misery.

With social care, meanwhile, she said:

Most of the council’s budget, like other councils, it goes on social care. Most of that is because of the privatisation of care homes, where people are charging a fortune and not necessarily getting particularly good care.

So we want care homes to be brought in-house, to be re-nationalised basically. And that would then give people good jobs, secure jobs, better-paid jobs than the people who are working in these care homes and being paid minimum wage, often from agencies.

And what we also want is free home care, which they’ve done in Tower Hamlets, so it is possible, and that would prevent a lot of people actually entering into residential care.

There’s also an issue with permanent exclusions from school, many of which involve children with special education needs. Academies, she stressed, “don’t want those children in their schools”. However:

local authorities still bear the responsibility for special education needs. So again, they could be looking at, ‘this is a discrimination issue, where schools are just getting rid of children’.

And there’s another expenditure here, she claimed, as the council uses a lot of agency staff for special education needs, where it could save money by keeping costs in-house.

Arise is ‘an openly socialist party’

In terms of where Arise is standing, Fitzpatrick explained:

We are an openly socialist party, so we are not standing in the traditional conservative areas of Harrow. We are standing in the center, really, so in the poorer parts of Harrow, the central part of Harrow, but one of the key things is that we’ve tried, as far as possible, to get people who have roots in that ward.

Without the money or recognition of national parties, she said:

Help is always welcome, and we’d love anybody in Harrow who wants to get involved in left-wing politics to contact us.

Your Party has given Arise its endorsement.

Arise has also been in contact with the Green Party, even deciding not to stand in the Greens’ strongest wards. For now, Greens have decided to stand in every ward. But there are hopes for future cooperation.

You can see more about Arise’s candidates here, and Arise’s key policies here.

Featured image via AriseParty

By Ed Sykes

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