Church and State blog: British Telecom: We pay BT £65.53 per month but Declan is told that there is nothing they can do about the bad TV reception we have been accustomed to getting of late (WITH UPDATE

Monday, May 22, 2017

British Telecom: We pay BT £65.53 per month but Declan is told that there is nothing they can do about the bad TV reception we have been accustomed to getting of late (WITH UPDATE - Day 3 24/5/2017)

UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)

It's not just our Church and State website that's under attack (71 blocks on public access to the site this month; 16 blocks last week; 5 blocks so far today) despite the fact that a leading web hosting provider, SiteGround, is paid $1,000 per year to host our site and manage the server. Tonight Declan phoned British Telecom Technical Support about the bad TV reception we have been accustomed to getting of late. BT is one of the world's leading communications services companies. Because our TV signal came through when the technical advisor took the call, Declan was told to monitor the situation for two days and get back to them if necessary. There was nothing they could do, he was told, when the signal was good enough on their end. Last night Declan was enjoying a Sunday night film with Sean Penn, that is, until the last twenty minutes of the film was scrambled! This is what the TV looked like when Declan made the call to BT Technical Support tonight:

DAY 2 UPDATE 23 May (12.20pm): Declan twice called BT Technical Support this morning about the problems we were experiencing watching Breaking News (about the Manchester bombing) on BBC 1 through our BT YouView box. It is not inconceivable that the YouView box we are paying BT good money for is no longer of much use to us, unless of course we intend spending time we do not have dealing with BT on a daily basis. This we obviously have no intention of doing, so we are now running the TV on Freeview using the outside aerial. We have been receiving the breaking news item on BBC 1 without reception problems; in fact, the signal on all the Freeview channels is better than we have ever had through our BT YouView box. A third BT technical advisor has just arranged an engineer visit for tomorrow afternoon. It remains to be seen what, if anything, this engineer will be able to do about the intermittent TV reception we have been receiving of late through our YouView box despite the good money we are paying for BT Infinity broadband (£786.36 per year).

DAY 3 UPDATE 24 May (4.05pm): We are still waiting for that engineer visit. Yesterday British Telecom informed Declan that he will be charged £129.99 on his next BT bill if this engineer reports that our fault has nothing to do with their network but is the result of our home wiring, fault with our equipment or their network has been damaged within the boundary of our property (this is quoting verbatim from the third ACR recording of all the calls Declan made to BT yesterday). So far today we are not experiencing reception problems through our YouView box or through the property aerial, so we should have no case to answer. See my blog post this afternoon, British Telecom: Declan's complaint to the CEO of BT about the handling of the bad TV reception we have been accustomed to getting of late through our BT YouView box.

From My Picks:

20 February: The Central London County Court: District Judge Avent dismisses Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us (WITH UPDATE 16/3/2017)

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

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.

Church and State blog

Monday, May 22, 2017

British Telecom: We pay BT £65.53 per month but Declan is told that there is nothing they can do about the bad TV reception we have been accustomed to getting of late (WITH UPDATE - Day 3 24/5/2017)

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