unlawful eviction (1)

It always surprises me that landlords think it's legal to simply change the locks in order to evict a tenant from their home, and even that it's legal to take and throw away their personal possessions. Whenever we challenge landlords who've done this, they always claim they're within their legal rights. My response to them is along the lines of, "I've got news for you - YOU'RE NOT. YOU'VE JUST COMMITTED A CRIMINAL OFFENCE."


I think landlords - and landladies - who are inclined to be vindictive have a sense for which tenants are vulnerable. My latest two unlawfully evicted clients are a self-effacing bloke who just isn't a fighter and doesn't have much self-confidence, and a pregnant woman who moved house to get away from an abusive partner. She went away for a month to look after her mother, who has cancer, and found the locks changed when she returned.

I so despise landlords who do this sort of thing. I wonder how many of them get away with it because their tenants don't know about their rights and don't know where to find out. I was doing a benefit check for a client once, and he happened to mention that he'd been unlawfully evicted the previous year. He was reluctant to do anything about it, even when I told him he could take the landlord to the cleaners for compensation for the loss of his possessions, trespass, injury to feelings. He qualified for legal aid so it would have cost him little or nothing.

The self-effacing bloke took two months to realise he might be able to claim compo for the unlawful eviction. Luckily for him he lives in Oldham. The local authority has an active tenancy relations officer who was able to give him sound information about what he could do. Oldham is prepared to prosecute landlords who do unlawful evictions. The pregnant woman was less lucky. She lives in Salford which does naff all to help unlawfully evicted tenants. They have no tenancy relations officer and only a part time housing advice service, for which you have to turn up and queue up and hope they'll have time to see you that day.

The woman has only recently been evicted, and it's very unlikely that the landlord has been able to relet the property yet, so we can get an injunction through the county court and get her reinstated in her home within days.

But getting compensation takes longer. We've just got a court order for a landlord to pay £15,000 to a tenant he evicted illegally, but it took more than a year. The long-winded nature of court proceedings puts more stress on the tenant. They get justice but it takes too long. I always try to encourage them by telling them the bastard landlord deserves to be dragged to court and made to pay.

The trouble is, some of them aren't angry enough. I told the pregnant woman we could get an injunction and have her back in her home within three days (assuming the landlady isn't stupid enough to disobey a court order). She asked me whether going to court was the right thing to do. "Well, this is how you get your home back," I said, "You told me that's what you want. " "Do I have to go to court?" "Well, yes, if you want to be sure of getting the injunction. The judge might want to ask you a couple of questions." She told me it was 'too soon' and she needed time to get her head round the idea of going to court. So instead of being able to slap the landlady with an injunction within 48 hours of her locking out her tenant, I've had to give her a week's notice that we're taking her to court. Judges do prefer it if you give notice to the person you're taking to court. They consider it more fair. But it will give the landlady time to concoct a story and try to defend the injunction.

Climate Camp Cymru

One of us had to go to the Climate Camp Cymru and it was me again - the person who hates camping. I didn't turn up for the start of the camp on Thursday 13th, I thought two nights in a tent on the Friday and Saturday would be enough to endure. But this turned out to be as much a conference as a political activity and it was worth going for what I learned from the various workshops.

Among other things, I didn't know the government was opening up so many opencast coal mines, in utter contradiction to its promises to cut carbon emissions. I am not shocked by this, governments are often hypocritical. But I'm wondering what kind of thinking lies behind it. Is it simply that the politicians are too smitten with big corporations to be able to refuse them when they apply for permission to dig up coal because the price of it has risen and coal mining is economic again? Are they more concerned about the oil running out than about climate change and they want to have a secure national supply of fuel? Is it a case of "head in sand", they don't want to think about what changes are really needed to bring down carbon emissions enough to prevent climate change?

I'll write more about what happened at the camp in later posts and on http://www.indymedia.org.uk/ (I'll give exact links later too.)

The camp itself was pitched on top of an old slag heap, just downhill from the almighty hole in the ground that is Ffos y fran opencast coal mine. This doesn't make for pretty pictures, and it drizzled for most of the weekend too. But, from the bottom up, the photos show different parts of the camp and campers having dinner outdoors; a whole-camp general outdoor meeting at which a consensus decision was thrashed out to go for a walk up the hill to look at the Coal Hole; people doing the walk; and the police inexplicably blocking the public road that leads past the site. Maybe they didn't believe that 200 people/activists could go on an innocent walk all together. But it was so: the people on the big walk were the ones who wanted a hassle-free afternoon. It had been agreed that anybody itching to do some direct action should walk in the OPPOSITE direction and check out the mine from the other side. The picture of the mine itself shows how close it is to some of the houses in Merthyr Tydfil; and the last picture shows the fresh slag heap from the mine towering over the town.

The police were fairly well behaved. Only one person was illegally stopped and searched, there were only 3 FIT photographers spying on the walkers (there shouldn't have been any, of course, there is absolutely no need to put photos of people walking on a public road on a police database, but "only three" is unusually low key); and only one person got arrested. This was because he insisted on his right to walk further up what was, after all, a public highway, even though the police had decided to block it. This same man had a police dog set on him just before he was arrested, which was filmed by one of the legal observers.

It had to happen

It had to happen sooner or later that we would get a failed asylum seeker landed with a bill for NHS services.

According to a recent Court of Appeal decision, failed asylum seekers do not qualify for free medical treatment (except for emergency treatment or 'communicable diseases' which might infect other people than failed asylum seekers) because they are not 'normally resident in Britain'. This is in spite of the fact that some of them might have been in the country for many years while they were going through appeals or waiting for a decision on their claim for asylum.

At one time, politicians were considering withdrawing the right to medical treatment from ALL asylum seekers (not just the failed ones) but there were too many objections and they decided it would do them too much political damage to be seen to do something so inhumane.

Now the unelected judges of the Court of Appeal have achieved what the politicians did not dare to do.

Of course, most failed asylum seekers simply don't try to get medical treatment because they know they can't pay for it. It is hard for most British people to understand what it's like to be in that position, because there are few people left who are old enough to remember what it was like before we had an NHS.

Our particular failed asylum seeker had no choice but to seek hospital treatment because she was about to give birth. She was subsequently charged £2,500 (the going rate for private treatment for maternity services) and, since she hasn't paid up straight away, the NHS has sent debt collectors after her.

The trouble with trying to charge failed asylum seekers for health care is THEY DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY. Our new mum, like all such FSAs, is living on food vouchers while she is waiting for the government to get round to deporting her. Food vouchers can be spent on food only at particular shops and you don't get change from them. So, its not like she can offer to pay the NHS in vouchers.

I can do one of two things for her:

1. Do what I usually do with people who have no money, no assets, and no chance of their finances ever improving and ask the creditor to write off the debt because they are never going to be able to collect it. And keep asking until they get the message.

2. Explain that our FSA has no access to actual hard currency, and never will, but could pay them in the tins of food she is able to buy with her food vouchers (say, to the value of £2 per week - she does have to be able to eat as well, unfortunately.)

Would they prefer baked beans, tinned peaches, or corned beef?

Noisy protest

The BNP has been drawing attention to itself one way and another on the way to the European Parliament elections. Much of it is negative, but unfortunately there may yet be enough people who are both disaffected and ignorant enough, or actually racist or nationalist enough, to vote them a seat or two in the European Parliament. This is depressing to think about.

It was even more depressing to hear that the BBC is giving them TV time for a party political broadcast. The BNP do not warrant the credibility this will give them. And, I do not pay my licence fee for the BBC to promote racist tripe.

However, the broadcast has not gone without protest. I spotted this demo outside the BBC headquarters when I was on my way home on the bus going along Oxford Road (that's Manchester, for anyone who doesn't live there.) I hopped off the bus and joined in. I was the only person on the demo wearing a suit - standard dress code where I work, I'm afraid. But so what? It isn't only students and SWP members who despise the neo nazis.

Can anyone think of a good alternative for what "BNP" should stand for? Myself and a few political friends had a go, but the best we could think up was "Boneheaded Nasties Party" and "Bigoted Nobheads Party". Surely someone can think of something more original?

Greedy Bastards

We know the recession has bitten in our part of the world: we've had four people come in for help with charging orders in just one week.

A charging order is what one of your creditors can try to get if you can't pay them back. It means, in effect, that they apply to the county court to get the loan secured on your house. They won't necessarily force your house to be sold. Some are happy to sit back for years while the debt racks up a vast amount of interest, and then, when you want to sell the house yourself, they take a big cut out of the proceeds. Only one of your creditors can get a charging order, and that one is always the most greedy, rapacious and unco-operative one. All of our charging order people had been paying off debts by instalments over a number of years, and all but one of their creditors, recognising that they were in financial straits, agreed to forego any more interest and accept small payments over time.

In all four cases, the one who refused was the same major high street bank.

Charging orders are frustrating to have to deal with, because there is a limit to what you can do about them. Creditors who apply for them nearly always get them. They don't always get the chance to force a house sale, though. We've had some success in the past getting conditions attached, such as, the creditor is barred from applying for an order of sale until the owner's youngest child turns 18. After all, why should children be made homeless because their parents were foolish enough to take on too big a debt? That isn't the children's fault.

There's one thing I would like to announce to every homeowner in the land: never, NEVER borrow an amount of money that is greater than one month's salary. That is, not more than an amount you can pay back within a year if you lose your job. But if you really must, get your home put into some-one else's name first!

Really Selling Us Out

This is not a book review, but I have to recommend Taking Liberties. It's about how New Labour has trashed our civil liberties since it first got elected in 1997. Although the subject matter is political, this book is aimed at everybody, not just political activists.

As a member of the Campaign Against The Arms Trade, (CAAT) there's a section of the book that particularly interested me. In 2007, the government stopped an investigation into corrupt arms deals between BAe systems and Saudi Arabia. They didn't want to upset the Saudi government in case they lost the very profitable trade they have in selling armaments to them. CAAT applied to the court of appeal to get this decision overturned, and the court declared the interference to be illegal. But it seems corruption in the arms trade goes beyond paying bribes.

In 2000, there was a series of bombings in Riyadh. They were later found to have been carried out by Islamic militants. But at the time, for political reasons, the Saudi police didn't want to acknowledge that tis was a possibility. So they decided to blame the bombings on Western ex-patriots.

The Saudi police first arrested Ross Skevins, a British paramedic who stopped to give first aid to one of the bomb victims. Then they arrested a Scottish man, Sandy Mitchell (the "arrest" consisted of being snatched off the street, shackled and hooded and thrown in the back of a van.) The police spent the next nine days beating and torturing a confession out of him. They did the same to a Canadian, Bill Sampson, and two other British men, Jim Cottle and James Lee. The British foreign office know exectly what was going on and did nothing. More than that, they lied to the victims families and claimed they were being well-treated, when they knew damn well they weren't. Even when the Saudis eventually agreed to a prisoner exchange in May 2003, the Foreign Office let the three men stay in jail until August. It then insulted their families by asking them to pay for the men's passage home. (The families efused.)

The final insult - to all British citizens - came when the men sued the Saudi government. When the case went to the House of Lords, the government intervened to prevent the court making a decision. The victims got no compensation whatsoever., and there is now a legal precedent which means no British citizen is likely to be able to get recompense for torture from any foreign government.

The British government literally sold its own citizens to ensure the continuation of the profits it makes from arms deals with a corrupt feudal state. Apparently these three lives were sold for £20 billion. This is what the BAe systems contract was worth to the government.

The Saudi police also nabbed a United States citizen, Mike Sedlak. The US government is as economically connected to the Saudis as the British government, and equally concerned with keeping on friendly terms with them. So, how much did the US sell Mike Sedlak for?

Ahem, nothing. When Mike Sedlak was detained, the US State Department hit the roof and demanded, and secured, his immediate release.

False Information

A friend of mine once nearly had a social security official arrested for giving him false information. [This story was reported in the Liverpool Free Press, a free paper that ran for a while in the seventies]. It was in 1976, when there was a clause in the social security legislation that read: "if any-one for the purpose of avoiding or reducing any liability under this Act makes any statement or representation which he knows to be false, he shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment..."

This meant that, if any Department for Social Security official gave a claimant false information to discourage them from claiming benefits, he was committing a criminal offence and could be arrested. This clause has long been abolished, but I often wish it was still in existence because officials lie to claimants with depressing regularity.

The commonest lie is to tell claimants that they can't get backdated payments, though you can get these for nearly all types of benefit. (The main exception is Disability Living Allowance.) The most blatant lie I ever came across was when an official at Warrington Jobcentre persuaded a young women that she had to say she was cohabiting with a man (as though they were married) when she was doing no such thing.

The young woman, Flo, had recently graduated and took a temporary job in Warrington. She arranged to lodge with a woman friend who lived in the town, but she wasn't able to move in straight away and the arrangement fell through. Then a man she'd known at University offered to let her stay in a spare room at his house for a while. The house was occupied by three male students, two of whom she already knew, so she accepted the offer. When her temporary job ended, she went to sign on. Since she didn't know Warrington very well, one of the lads, Kieran, went with her to the Jobcentre. An official interviewed her the same day (this was in the days before they expected everybody to claim by phone) but when she told him she was sharing a house with three male students, he said she would have to say she was "cohabiting". Flo, being utterly ignorant of the benefits system, didn't quite know what he meant. Naturally she was living with these men, she was sharing a house with them. The official asked if Kieran was her boyfriend. Flo said he used to be, she had gone out with him a few times when they were both at university. The official told her, "It will be all right to say you're living with him, you can get a student exemption form and it won't affect your benefits."

This was utter nonsense. There's no such thing as a "student exemption form".

The official filled in the form for her. He didn't read it back and Flo didn't read it herself before she signed it. She assumed the official knew what he was talking about.

Two weeks later Flo got a letter from the Jobcentre awarding her 85 pence per week Jobseekers Allowance because her "partner" Kieran was responsible for supporting her and his income counted against her social security benefits.

Kieran wasn't amused. He wasn't her partner and he sure as hell wasn't responsible for keeping her. Flo appealed, but didn't get any independent advice for some time. (If she had come to us, we would have immediately put in a new claim for Jobseekers Allowance). She spent the next three months digging herself deeper and deeper into debt and surviving on the communal supplies of food in the student house while she waited for her appeal to be heard. She found a temporary job which lasted only a few weeks, and afterwards she didn't bother to sign on again. The bus fare to the Jobcentre was more than the amount they were paying her.

In the event, after we gave her help with her appeal, The DWP changed their decision before the appeal hearing and paid her backdated Jobseekers Allowance. Her debts amounted to more than her back pay. I advised Flo that she could complain and apply for compensation for the distress she'd been caused, for being lied to, and for the interest she would have to pay on the money she had borrowed. But she proved to be a wimp when it came to asserting her rights. She said she "didn't want to get any-one into trouble" and refused to pursue it.

Black Gold

Black Gold is the title of a film about Africa and fair trade. I went to see it at the FACT arts centre in Liverpool recently. It's an eye-opener, even if you already know something about fair trade.



The "black gold" is coffee. The film focussed 0n Ethiopian farmers who depend on it for their living. In ordinary trade they get paid one birr ($0.57, or about 30 pence) for each kilo of coffee beans they produce. To be able to buy essential foodstuffs, clothing, healthcare and education, they need to earn 10 birr per kilo. Most of the £1.60 to £2.10 we pay for a cup of coffee in a cafe in Britain goes to auctioneers (middle men who buy the raw beans), processors (all based in Western countries) and coffee speculators. The world price for coffee is set by the New York Stock Exchange, by people who are very far away in all senses from the people who actually grow it.



It's not that there is a conspiracy by Western capitalists to keep African farmers in poverty. But when powerful people with similar interests pursue their self-interest, it can look like a conspiracy. The film showed a session of the World Trade Organisation in 2006. All the developed countries had sent a hundred or more delegates to the talks. The African nations could only afford to send about half a dozen each. Most of the trade deals were done, not at open sessions which all the delegates attended, but at lots of littel caucus meetings privately arranged. The Western countries had enough delegates to send some-one to every single meeting. The Africans didn't. In this way the developed countries used their wealth to exclude them from the decision-making, and ensured their interests were not represented.



I will always buy fair trade products, because I would much rather give my money to the farmers who grow the coffee (or tea, or sugar, or dried fruit) than to the mega-corporations like Nestle and Kraft. But I do this in the knowledge that fair trade has a lot of flaws.



The principal problem is, the fair trade movement does not do enough to undermine or transform global capitalism. The African farmers are trying to get a bigger slice of the capitalist pie. But getting a bigger share in a system that is inherently exploitive is futile. Capitalism operates by making most of the people in the world "losers". It can't function any other way.



Fair trade will only ever benefit a small percentage of Third World farmers. Capitalism is flexible enough to allow some of them to have a slightly bigger piece of the pie. Supermarkets can afford to give one or two shelves over to fair trade produce because it makes them look good. But they will only ever see it as a niche market. This does nothing to challenge the headlock the big companies have on trade in Third World agricultural products.



And the world justice movement is dominated by Western Christians who inevitably take a patronising, top-down approach. African farmers are dependent on outsiders to set up better deals for their produce. The farmers form co-operatives to make collective decisions on what to do with any extra money they get. But they are not learning anything about how the global market works or how much their products could really be worth. The overall effect of the film was to present the African farmers as objects for charity, not as people for whom we should be demanding economic equality.