Church and State blog: Alexander Litvinenko’s situation and ours

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.

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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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Alexander Litvinenko’s situation and ours

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