Church and State blog: The People's Supermarket finally let us go!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The People's Supermarket finally let us go!

Kate Bull, co-founder of The People's Supermarket

Action for Employment (A4E) is a private company that has received £300 million of Government training contracts and controls 25% of the long-term unemployment budget for the Department for Work and Pensions. Today was the last day of a one-month A4E 'work placement' - 16 hours a week of unpaid work - for Declan and me at The People's Supermarket (TPS). We couldn't wait for the month to end, and we learnt absolutely nothing, apart from getting to know the various bus routes to and from Westminster Reference Library because we were given no access to computers at TPS. Neither TPS nor A4E reimbursed our travel expenses for the month, and we even had to use our own printer. Despite that the supermarket cooks ready meals (co-founder Arthur Potts Dawson is a celebrity chef), I wouldn't be able to comment on its tastiness because we were never offered any food.

We were supposed to be involved in a project delivering volunteer opportunities to clients of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (MF), but TPS had other plans. I wasn't there a few hours when I was told to put on a yellow t-shirt and come to the shop floor as soon as I had five minutes of free time; she even told me to "shut up" when I protested. We also have an email from a member of staff telling us that we should put in time on the shop floor so we would be able to empathize with clients of MF (see the email I wrote to TPS near the end of this 'work placement' in the blog of 23 April 'Work Boost' at The People's Supermarket? I don't think so!). The agenda to have us working on the shop floor was so obvious that for the first two weeks I had to sit at the end of a couch in the members' common area while I worked on creating a volunteer leaflet for TPS. Frankly, it was some achievement that for the entire month we managed to stay off the shop floor.

A4E are under tremendous pressure to ensure that at the very least they send Declan back to our jobcentre with any sort of work experience on the shop floor of TPS so that Highgate Jobcentre Plus can then run a number on his jobseeker's agreement: a job in a supermarket such as Tesco, Sainsbury's or Morrisons would be just the ticket to not only have us out of our home and ready to be fired at the drop of a hat, but more significantly, see us back to the street. So A4E Camden have threatened they will issue a sanction letter against Declan tomorrow if he doesn't agree to his one-month 'work boost' - 30 hours a week of unpaid work - at TPS. At the hearing of Declan's renewed application for permission to apply for Judicial Review (see blog of 14 April Declan's Notice of Renewal of claim for permission to apply for Judicial Review), he will be arguing that A4E is engaging in an escalating series of harassing and discriminatory acts (see blog of 15 April Declan back to Lynne Featherstone MP with A4E's 14th breach of contract).

Just before leaving TPS, I asked co-founder Kate Bull to help us to stop the suspension of our benefits by getting in contact with A4E Camden Placement Advisor, Lola Olowu-Worth (who also happens to be Declan's employment officer) to tell her that she didn't need either of us to do our one-month 'work boost' at TPS. She was very reluctant about writing that and in the end she walked away from me saying that she wasn't going to tell me what she was going to write. Well, this is what she wrote to the highly abusive Olowu-Worth:

Click to enlarge

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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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The People's Supermarket finally let us go!

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