Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Alexander Litvinenko’s situation and ours

Last night was very cold. Despite the fact that I wear three layers of clothing for my legs, I keep waking up with pain all through them from the cold; the rest of my body remains more or less warm throughout the night. One of the times I woke up – it must have been about 5.00am – I saw 5 or 6 silhouettes flying above me. For a moment I thought they were bats, until I realised they were pigeons. They sleep on the ledge of the building in front of our patch. They're rough sleepers too!

It would appear the police are growing increasingly impatient with their lack of harassment of us over the past few days. Last night when Declan went to his usual place to collect cardboard, there was nothing there except an out-of-place van. He had no sooner turned to return to our patch, when the van took off. I wouldn't be surprised if the police pay us a fourth visit tonight.

No St Mungo's Contact and Assessment Team (CAT) visited us last night either, despite that Declan spoke yesterday with the PA to St Mungo's CEO Charles Fraser. He obviously couldn't care less about our predicament (not even that I was assaulted in the patch in the early hours of the morning last Saturday), notwithstanding that he has a duty of care in relation to us. It seems not to matter a jot to him that St Mungo's is a charity that receives donations from people who supposedly would like to see homeless people off the street.

Tomorrow is women's clothes day in the Whitechapel Mission. When we left the mission today, we saw plenty of large plastic bags full of clothes in the main hallway of the building. They're going to have difficulty telling me tomorrow that they don't have any women's clothes, as they told me last Wednesday.

Yesterday morning in the Dellow Centre, the nun in charge of clothes was going around handing out plastic bags full clothes to many homeless, like it was Christmas day. And yet I knew that had I asked her for what I need (which she already knows anyway), she would have given me more or less what she gave me two weeks ago. Then she gave me an old pair of jeans that were way too big for me, a pink shirt and a white jumper. Why would I bother?

These religious organisations (the Missionaries of Charity, St Mungo's, the Dellow Centre and the Whitechapel Mission) don't seem too concerned about me reporting in this blog some of the things they try out on us. Maybe it's because they don't believe we can or will survive; and that they are convinced that when our judicial review renewal hearing comes up in the High Court on 11 December, the judge is going to dismiss our case and we won't be able to appeal him. On the appeal, they are seriously mistaken. Declan has everything he needs from the Civil Appeals Office (including a blank Appellant's notice), and we are confident we can file any sort of appeal within a week. It would surely be a first: two rough sleepers filing an appeal against a High Court judge. It would certainly add to our story, given how we were made homeless by the Department for Work and Pensions on 3 November.

The back of floor 3 in the Idea Store Whitechapel library is becoming akin to some sort of communal meeting spot. Staff and security guards meet at the help desk for a chat and a few laughs. Somebody at the moment is shouting on the phone!

Declan, who normally sits on a sofa near my desk, has just told me that two members of staff were having a great chat beside him. I am wearing earplugs, so all I can hear is what is around me. Now all I hear is staff at the help desk.

Declan reckons that he is supposed to confront this staff with the fact that this is a library and could they ever shut up. Then a security guard comes and blah, blah, blah. We have have been dealing with these sort of plays for confrontation for years, so obviously we are not going to fall prey to it here. Declan has become particularly good at avoiding these sort of situations. Anybody interested in the methods and techniques the police use to neutralise targets should read about the COINTELPRO operations, a series of counterintelligence programs designed by the FBI. In particular, the sort of the things the FBI were doing around the time of the American civil rights movement.

I've been following the news about Alexander Litvinenko, a former KBG colonel and harsh critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He fled Russia and now lives in the UK. However, he fell ill on 1 November after a meeting in a London sushi bar. John Henry, a clinical toxicologist, who examined Litvinenko, told the BBC there was no doubt he had been poisoned by thallium (a colourless rat poison), probably in the bar. Friends said Litvinenko had "no doubt that he was poisoned at the instigation of the Russian government".

I do find similarities between Litvinenko's situation and ours. He was poisoned because he is a harsh critic of the Russian President. We, on the other hand, are homeless, sleeping rough and harassed by the police because we are harsh critics of Catholic Church in particular. There is one significant difference, though. Whilst Litvinenko was granted political asylum by the UK government in 2001, it is the UK government that is trying to take us out.