Church and State blog: Police threaten to evict us from the porch

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Police threaten to evict us from the porch

Last night we received our fifteenth visit to the porch by the City of London Police. One moment I am sleeping in my sleeping bag and the next I am listening almost in disbelief to this big stocky policeman telling us that he and his partner have an order to evict us from the porch.

"We have been sleeping here since 3 November 2006 and we are gone before 5.30am every morning," I point out, adding that since the beginning of the year a cleaner has been going in and out of the building through the porch door every weekday night between 10.00pm and 11.00pm and another cleaner has been doing the same between 5.00am and 5.30am (we get up at 4.40am) and our behaviour has never been deemed disruptive or disorderly. I also mention that for over a year now workers have been accessing the building through the porch door at all hours of the night without any difficulty whatsoever – Declan even tears the cardboard so there is no chance the door is ever blocked.

"Some rough sleepers get drunk and leave their porches dirty, upsetting and angering the owners," says the other police officer. "Ah," I reply, "but we don't drink or smoke and in fact almost every night I spend some time cleaning the porch floor." Declan also mentioned our protection under the Human Rights Act 1998 – we became aware of our rights as rough sleepers under the Act after police told us on 28 May that rough sleepers were to be woken every hour to force them off the streets (see here).

Anyway, if the City of London Police insist on evicting us from the porch, Declan intends complaining to London Mayor Ken Livingstone under the Human Rights Act: we have been sleeping in this porch for almost 16 months without one single complaint; we are in this dreadful situation through no fault of our own; and eviction will put us at even greater risk (which can only be the intention - I have been dragged out of the porch by the ankles and on another occasion I was repeatedly kicked in the shoulders and chest, despite the porch being in a business area heavily covered by CCTV).

Eviction was not the only hurdle we were asked to jump in the past few days – a week ago it was the near collapse of Declan's petition to the UN in support of therapeutic cloning (see previous blog), which is still taking a battering. On Thursday I was stopped from selling The Big Issue (a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches) after my pitch was unceremoniously taken over by a street distributor of the WTF Magazine – as I reported in my blog of 20 January "Begging for over a week", I have been begging in the local train station since 10 January – so my fling as a Big Issue vendor since Monday lasted, well, two days.

Needless to say, this weekend we have almost no money to buy food - I will be begging in the train station again on Monday morning, having been threatened with arrest on 18 January. Of course, like every other homeless, we could get some coffee and a basic breakfast for 60p in the Methodist Church-run Whitechapel Mission except that the minister’s wife barred us back in June due to concerns about our safety. It hasn’t helped that all last week food has been particularly scarce in the Sisters of Mercy-run Dellow Centre, even on Friday, when Medecins du Monde UK made an appearance. Things are not looking good for next week either, as they will be closed on Wednesday. On Monday, a homeless woman cleaned herself in the women’s washroom with a broken piece of soap, and did her teeth with her finger and some water. A look at their annual report of 2006/07 doesn’t provide any clues, but contains three pages of supporters: charities, societies, churches, companies, livery companies, religious organisations, trusts, statutory funders (London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London Councils and The Corporation of London) and the Duke of Norfolk (to whom Declan reported the withdrawal of his use of a landline phone) as Patron.

We have yet to hear from the European Court of Human Rights – Declan received a letter from the Registrar turning down his request of 8 September for priority under Rule 41 of the Rules of the Court, but informing him that the Court would examine his application, also of 8 September, possibly before the end of January. We have arrived to the conclusion that since we didn’t convince the Court of the merits of our case for priority, the chances are we didn’t put a good enough case together for the British government to be invited to set out its observations on the merits and admissibility of the case. I am sure it is also relevant that, according to Philip Leach in Taking a Case to the European Court of Human Rights, in 2003 96% of cases were declared inadmissible, or struck out, by the Court.

For the record, this is Declan’s second email on Thursday to The Big Issue outreach manager:

Subject: WTF Magazine

Dear Mr Joseph

Thank you for your email regarding the problems I am having with Ebuyer (UK) Limited's WTF Magazine.

You recommend that in correspondence to companies I should be "more specific as to what the problem is rather than simply referring to the 'takeover' of the pitch". Should Ebuyer (UK) request more detail from me, I will inform the company that at 7.35am this morning, five minutes after my wife stood into her Big Issue pitch at The George Pub, Liverpool Street, a street distributor of the WTF Magazine planted his trolley full of magazines within no more than a metre from her and proceeded to distribute the magazine between her and the trolley, completely oblivious to the fact that she was standing only a few inches behind him and less than a foot to his right – a railing at her right side. My wife left the pitch at 8.30am, having sold no magazines.

With reference to the quote from the letter of 10 September 2007 I received from John Bird, Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Big Issue, you state: "I should point out that the quote from John Bird (who is not Dr.) relates to you not needing to contact him directly about Big Issue problems and to instead contact Distribution staff such as myself, and is therefore not relevant in communications you have with other companies." However, the quote to which you refer also indicates that he is not unwilling to get involved in these matters:

I have employed many people over the years to do jobs related to the running of The Big Issue. I have never employed them to do my job; likewise I do not do their job. Please bear this in mind when you are composing your letters. You do not need to address your letters to me, as it is not my job. I would only get involved if you were utterly and totally let down by those whose job it is in The Big Issue. I hope this assists in your deliberations in pursuit of your claims.

Yours sincerely
Declan Heavey
Big Issue badge no. 1163

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Police threaten to evict us from the porch

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