The rich, the rich, we’ve got to get rid of the rich

Abstract

This is the chant of 1500 protesters marching across Tower Bridge in London on a very wet and very cold Saturday afternoon in January. This was the very boisterous and loud section of the ‘March for Homes’, which started in Shoreditch in east London, led by the Focus E15 campaign – a group of young mothers and their children who were forcibly evicted out of a homeless hostel in 2013. The hostel sits in the shadow of the billion pound developments of the Olympic Park and the Westfield Shopping Centre. The campaign and fight of the Focus E15 mothers is just one example of the terrible and cruel ways that working-class families and young mothers in particular are being treated in austerity Britain. This is the consequence of inequality gone mad, unrestrained markets, and a lack of empathy for those who struggle to survive in a rampant neoliberal campaign for wealth and more wealth to be redistributed upwards. This is my current research: examining what is happening to working class families, and how precarious their lives have become because of the structuring forces of the open market. Drawing upon my previous research in St Ann’s in Nottingham, I show how working-class people and their communities have been devalued to such an extent that the land that they live on is worth more than them.