Squeezed to the last drop

In my previous blog last Saturday, I reported that Declan's Google Mail had just been raided: all emails sent to him after 12 August were unceremoniously dumped in the "trash" (which is why I was able to find them through the search facility), and the names and emails of 2,500 scientists were deleted for good. Our reaction might not have been the desired one because that night somebody threw a large bag of rubbish over us as we slept in the porch.

I also reported on 20 January (see "Begging for over a week") that from 10 January I had been forced to go into the local train station early in the morning and ask people for some spare change so that Declan and I could get by for the day – a situation that arose from all the problems we were having with street distributors while attempting to sell The Big Issue (a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches) and bad weather (weather statistics have revealed that last month was the wettest since 1995, with only seven wetter Januarys in the past 100 years).

All of this took place less than two weeks before the European Court of Human Rights was tentatively scheduled to examine Declan's application of 8 September – Declan received a letter from the Registrar turning down his request for priority under Rule 41 of the Rules of the Court, but stating that his application would "possibly" be examined before the end of January.

We don't know if the European Court has indeed examined the application and decided it is inadmissible or is going to invite the observations of the British government on the merits and admissibility of the case. In particular, the Government’s observations would be invited in answer to two questions:

      1. Did the two suspensions of the applicant’s joint claim for Jobseeker's Allowance on 18 August and 19 September 2006 and the subsequent ceasing of entitlement on 27 September 2006 (in the middle of High Court proceedings for permission to apply for an urgent judicial review, because he did not “sign on” two days before he was due to do so on 29 September) constitute a violation of the applicant's right to respect for his private life and family life within the meaning of Article 8 of the Convention?
      2. Did the applicant have an affective domestic remedy within the meaning of Article 13 of the Convention in respect of the alleged violation of Article 8 of the Convention? (There may be special circumstances absolving the applicant from exhausting domestic remedies, for example if the applicant is able to establish that there has been a "pattern of violations" over a period of time, which Declan is claiming: among other things, he wrote to the jobcentre and also the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions informing them of the mistake in respect of the ceasing of entitlement but, in breach of regulation 27(1) of the Jobseeker's Allowance Regulations 1996, the decision was not changed, and neither was he provided with the explanation he was entitled to within a month for an automatic right to appeal to a social security appeal tribunal.)

We don’t know when notification from the Registrar will reach us but what we do know is that we are being squeezed to the last drop: Declan has been informed by Medecins du Monde UK that they won’t be writing any more prescriptions for us; the Big Issue has refused to sell us magazines in quantities of one, the only quantity we are now able to afford; and as I predicted in the blog of 20 January, the Tower Hamlets Council-run Idea Store Whitechapel has imposed a 3-hour limit on both our cards in respect of computer access.

Take Medecins du Monde UK. According to the website Medecins du Monde UK, theirs is "a healthcare initiative reaching out to vulnerable people in the UK who cannot access mainstream healthcare services", yet it seems that this worthy mandate doesn’t apply to either Declan or I. On 23 January, when Declan attended Medecins du Monde UK's Project: London Walk-in Medical Centre on Pott Street because we were both suffering from heavy colds, he was informed that in the future they would not write another prescription (Declan has this breach of mandate on record with, among others, the Secretary General of Medecins du Monde, Dr Fabrice Giraux). This is particularly hard-hitting because, as the director of Medecins du Monde UK is aware, the National Health Service (NHS) has repeatedly refused both Declan and I help with health costs, including the cost of prescriptions, because as sellers of The Big Issue we can only declare that our income covering the 4-week period prior to 25 October 2007 did not exceed our requirements by more than £3.43, the threshold level for qualification for a certificate HC2 (full help with health costs). Declan has already been hospitalised twice since we became rough sleepers on 3 November 2006, the first time in December 2006 with pneumonia, and the second last October with a viral infection – after he stood in his pitch for over an hour and a half selling the Big Issue in the rain - so not having access to any healthcare service means, on top of everything else, we now have to be particularly vigilant about weather.

Take The Big Issue. On Thursday Declan bought one Big Issue from the co-ordinator at Liverpool Street but when he attempted to buy another magazine from him on Friday, he was told that he could not buy Big Issues in quantities of one (the vendor pays 70p for a magazine, which sells for £1.50). Declan emailed the outreach manager, and would also have emailed John Bird, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue, except that in a letter dated 10 September – two days after Declan lodged his case against the UK with the European Court of Human Rights – Bird more or less told Declan to stop bothering him (ever since, Declan’s countless emails to the Big Issue regarding, among others, The London Paper, London Lite, Sport, ShortList, City AM, etc, seem to have fallen on deaf ears). Only last Tuesday evening, Declan was again walked off his pitch by the Evening Standard's freesheet, the London Lite: this time a street distributor of the freesheet chose to distribute directly in front of Declan, and at such a distance that Declan could have reached out and taken a paper from him.

I am still begging in the train station (normally from 6.50am to 8.15am, the time I need to put together a few pounds). I haven’t been arrested yet as the police officer – the same one that issued me my first ticket for begging on 13 November as his partner proceeded to call me "the scum of the earth", and then forcibly threw me out of the station – told me I would on 18 January. Needless to say, things are particularly difficult for us now that we have been left with nothing: I am still eating almost exclusively the bit of grated cheese and two white sandwich bread that the nuns from the Sisters of Mercy-run Dellow Centre give the homeless "for later", while Declan eats nothing for lunch and waits until the evening when normally the local Sainsbury's reduces some food (things have arrived to the point that Declan sometimes decides against walking the half hour it takes to get to his pitch in the late afternoon because he is too hungry and can't risk either being walked off by some street distributor or coming back empty handed and exhausted). I don't have to be reminded that just in front of the Idea Store Whitechapel is the Methodist Church-run Whitechapel Mission (which opens on weekends, unlike the Dellow Centre), where the homeless go to wash and buy a cheap breakfast, but which barred us back in June due to concerns about our safety. We are of course all up to soldier on in this unfortunate situation - not of our making - and I have even been keeping a diary since 19 November in the event the police arrest me and I find myself being prosecuted for begging (see "Defence for a court").

I can't but note that this encroachment of religion in public life is of course much worse in the Middle East. The case of Afghan Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old student journalist, sentenced to death by religious judges in an Islamic court last week for downloading an internet report on women's rights, is a case in hand: on Wednesday, Afghanistan's upper house of parliament passed a motion confirming the death sentence, and it was only following widespread international protests and appeals to the President, Hamid Karzai, that the sentence has been withdrawn (of course, as pointed out in an article in the Independent on 31 January, "even if he is freed, it would be hard for the student to escape retribution in a country where fundamentalists and warlords are increasingly in the ascendancy").

The prevailing notion that religion is intrinsically deserving of respect, and should be handled with kid gloves, was noted on 5 April 2007 by award-winning journalist, author and former MP, Matthew Parris, in his Times column about Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor and now Prime Minister:

This summer Gordon Brown is to publish a book, Courage, profiling eight human studies in that quality. Whom has the politician chosen? Anyone dangerously controversial? Mr Brown has selected Martin Luther King, Nurse Edith Cavell, Robert Kennedy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg (who saved Hungarian Jews), Dame Cicely Saunders (of the hospice movement), Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela.

Courageous choices, Chancellor. No place here for Copernicus, though?

No, still a bit risky - he was only pardoned by the Vatican in 1993.

For the record, this is Declan’s letter of complaint against Idea Store Whitechapel, which he emailed on 29 January to the Head of Idea Stores, Ian McNichol (we subsequently learnt from the Council that our new 3-hour limit on computer access is irretractable):

Subject: Idea Store Whitechapel

Dear Mr McNicol,

I refer further to my original complaint of 21 January 2008 to Cllr Denise Jones, Leader of Tower Hamlets Council, regarding Idea Store Whitechapel and the repeated loss of computer bookings and internet access on both my wife's card (card no. D000350314) and my card (card no. D000355837) since 14 November 2007.

In my email to you yesterday evening in your capacity as Head of Idea Stores, to whom Cllr Jones referred my original complaint, I confirmed that although I had exhausted my limit of 3-hour computer time on computer 15 on floor 1, my wife was given an additional hour on my card from 5.14pm to 6.14pm on the standard "override" of the system, given computer availability. I further complained that, despite computer availability, I was later denied an extra hour on my wife's card, the member of staff stating that the "override" of the system - which has applied to both my wife's card and my own for many months now - no longer applies.

I can confirm that this afternoon, and despite computer availability, both my wife and I have been refused an additional hour of computer time, the same member of staff stating that the “override” of the system no longer applies to either my wife's card or my own.

As you are aware, on 21 January the manager of Idea Store Whitechapel, Mr Zoinul Abidin, wrote the following to me:

... you are free to make a complaint with the council's corporate complaints section. In future please approach them for any queries, as opposed to sending e-mails to me.

Please would you advise about the Idea Store booking system and the functionality of the system at your earliest possible convenience.

As I explained in my email of 21 January to Cllr Jones, since 22 October 2007 my wife has been using as much of her computer time in Idea Store Whitechapel as she can to contact distinguished scientists and academics to invite them to sign my petition to the United Nations in support of work on therapeutic cloning and the use of stem cells for research and for the treatment of disease. To date this petition has been signed by 295 scientists, including 21 Nobel prizewinners.

Yours sincerely,
Declan Heavey

cc Cllr Denise Jones, Leader of Tower Hamlets Council