Gordon Maloney on Organising and Power

A discussion about the different strategies that make up a movement.

I’m curious about how to describe you, would you call yourself an organiser? An activist? 

I’m pretty relaxed about it. A lot of people feel very strongly about the distinctions between activism, organising, mobilising, campaigning… The way I see it is that you kind of need to be a bit of everything. In Living Rent, we do the campaigning stuff in Parliament, we lobby for legislation changes and I think we punch above our weight in those spaces. But we also do the grassroots, boots on the ground neighbourhood organising. The power from each flows and supplements the other. We only have any credibility when speaking to politicians because of the stuff we’re doing on the ground.

How did you first get involved with Living Rent?

I was involved from the very start, I remember very vividly the immediate aftermath of the Independence Referendum. The Radical Independence Campaign that had been this big voice for progressive visions around independence. The referendum was a no and there was all this energy that had been built up. A lot of people wanted to keep doing those things, and had enjoyed the sense of agency and power. The Government just announced they were doing a consultation on a new Housing Bill and a breakaway group of us in one of those meetings wanted to coordinate around that. Since then I’ve been involved in various positions, I’m on the national campaigns forum now.

When you publish something like the short-term lets app, which helps residents raise objections to new short-term lets, what kind of blowback are you experiencing? 

It’s really crazy. I’m not an app developer, but during lockdown I did one of those online coding bootcamps. Every now and again I’ll spot something where there’s an obvious opportunity… So, that app, all it does is facilitate people to take part in a process that already exists. We were being accused of the most hysterical stuff. That campaign was being compared to pogroms and the clearances. One person sent me a message saying it was a hate crime. On the one hand the response to it was super useful to the campaign, because it really shows these people up for how silly and detached from reality they are. I’ve always been struck by this extreme sense of entitlement that landlords seem to have… It’s really kinda baffling to me how they worked themselves up into this position, from an almost sociological perspective.

What do you think got landlords to this position of entitlement? 

I think lots of them are just arseholes. I don’t like to moralise about it, I don’t know how useful that is. But I think some of them are just objectionable people. But I think there’s a sense that lots of them have that the gig is up. They see being a landlord as ‘making money in your sleep’, and they know that rent controls are coming, and Airbnb empires are going to get broken apart. For these people who have made it such a pillar of their dream of financial independence, it means this regulation is existential. For more vulnerable people politics are always existential but for people in their position it very rarely is.

Do landlords organise well in Scotland? 

Considering how much money and resources are floating about in the sector; no, not at all. I’m often surprised by frankly how amateurish so much of their stuff has been. I spend a lot of time in landlord forums online and of course there are professional bodies, but there’s also a big culture of people who have no idea what they are doing. But given how much money they have, even this poorly organised sector is able to exert a lot of influence. One of the things I think shapes that is that people don’t like landlords. There are times we’ve been out in stalls with petitions for rent controls and people are quite literally lining up to sign it. Landlords don’t want to have these conversations in public, because they know they are not gonna land on sympathetic ears. Increasingly what they’ve been doing is removing themselves from any kind of public debate and instead using legal mechanisms. And to be clear this is something that’s happening all around the world, they know they won’t win in a democratic space so they throw loads of money around. We are organising people, they are organising money.

A friend of mine was looking into advice on getting out of debt/investing money once you’ve paid it off. Every single guidance eventually gets to the step of: ‘Now you should buy properties to let in order to supplement your income’. It feels like more and more, becoming a landlord is just seen as one of the few ways to make a comfortable income….

That isn’t some coincidence. In the 80s it was the deliberate policy of Tories to create this broad demographic of landlords. If you’re a fairly middle class person, you have a decent job and  mortgage on your flat and you inherit £50k, it frankly is the most sensible thing to do financially. What that means is that where extra capital is floating around, the prudent thing for people to do is invest it in these parasitic, speculative ways. You can imagine a different structuring of the economy where if you have £50k the prudent thing to do would be to invest in a local renewable energy company, something productive for the economy. One of the big prizes [for our organising] is not just improving the situation for tenants, actually it’s about changing the basis for the entire economy. The 2008 crash was a housing crash, that shows how central housing is to the entire economy. It’s certainly not less so now. What are the massive knock-on effects in the economy? What does it mean if tenants have an extra £300 they are going to spend in the local economy? What does it mean if people who would previously have been speculating on property invest that money in something more productive?

In a piece for Huck about the rent controls you wrote: “…these legislative victories were not achieved by conciliation and compromise, but by uncompromising demands from the union, confident that its legitimacy comes from the mass of tenants it represents, not the glossy reports it publishes”. Why choose this strategy over others? 

When Living Rent was set up in 2014, it was to shape this piece of legislation that became the 2016 Housing Act. We were pushing for it to include rent controls [among other demands like scraping short assured tenancies and no-fault evictions]. I remember having meetings with Shelter and other organisations where they thought we were crazy ‘by talking about rent controls you jeopardise the whole bill’. Actually what happened is that by introducing this more radical set of demands, we actually shifted the middle ground. The [other demands] sailed through, if we hadn’t been talking about rent controls, landlords would have focused their efforts on stopping that. If you go in already compromising, when you have to compromise again you’re nowhere near what you wanted. Generally, not all models of rent controls are the same. There’s lots of ways that a watered down, weakened version could set back the case for proper rent controls. You can’t accept a halfway measure. Our approach is to marry radicalism with a medium to long-term approach to change.

We’re speaking during the week when a couple of pro-Palestine camps have emerged in the US and in Edinburgh. You’re a Jewish person, based in Edinburgh, so I wondered what you make of the accusation some have made that those camps make the Jewish community feel unsafe? 

I think the camps are great. I’ve been very actively involved in Palestine solidarity stuff for a long time, often in very specifically Jewish contexts. I think Jews are vastly over-represented in these protest camps like the one in Edinburgh that got set up on a Friday and that evening there was a Kiddush in the camp. That’s been really lovely to see. A whole generation of young Jewish people are rediscovering an anti-colonial, progressive, radical Jewish identity. One of the things that’s so frustrating is the way Jewish suffering is exploited, you saw it through the Corbyn years, to give cover to other people. In this case it’s Israel committing a genocide in Gaza. In 2019, it was to shield the Tories around any meaningful interrogation around their Islamophobia.

How does change happen? 

I think one of the things that I’ve observed a lot is that it is so easy for people to become disillusioned. All sorts of things have changed dramatically but you log on to Twitter and see the most obscene things sharpening. It’s all designed to make you lose that sense of agency. That’s how change doesn’t happen, people burning out and losing the sense of power. One thing we always try to do at Living Rent is do this stuff sustainably. The idea is to have lots of people doing small amounts. The whole point of building Living Rent is that we needed an infrastructure of the Left. We’re in this for the long slog and we have to build organisations and treat each other in a way that organises that.

If I died today and left Everything Mixtape in my inheritance to you, who would you interview next? 

I’d be really interested in hearing from progressive people in the SNP… the SNP Socialists group, or the SNP Trade Unionists group… I would love to know what they think the way forward is. We’re [speaking] just hours after Kate Forbes, who’d be at home in the worst parts of the Republican Party, has been made Deputy First Minister. How do they reconcile that? And more importantly, what are they gonna do? Where do we go from here?

What’s been inspiring you lately? 

I think the camps have been really inspiring. The sheer stakes of it. Beyond physical threats, and obviously they’ve been brutalised, these institutions have explicitly said they want lists of all these people so they don’t hire them. But the people are turning out anyway. It’s such a beautiful reminder… you see Eurovision contestants saying ‘we signed contracts, we couldn’t possibly pull out’. How shameless and spineless. You look away for a moment and there are people willing to risk absolutely everything.

This interview was first published on Everything Mixtape, an interview Substack from filmmaker and writer Sam Gonçalves – subscribe to it HERE.