As of midnight tonight squatting will be a
criminal offence.
And hurrah to that I say. At last an end to all those times I’ve been
out to get some milk and come back to find an anarchist collective has moved
into the flat.
Because that’s the odd thing about
this. It’s an issue that a lot of people
are very scared of, but which rarely if ever seems to actually happen. I mean, how many times has a family returned
from holiday to find strangers living in their homes? I venture to suggest hardly ever. As it happens the only incident I ever came
across was in my legal days when we had a landlord client who took the
opportunity of his tenants being on holiday to move another family into the
property. The first family came back
from wherever to find their possessions piled up in the hallway. And you have to admit, that's not quite the same thing.
It is a sure sign of a bad law that it
sounds like it’s been drafted in response to a slightly drunk middle aged
middle class man in a pub. You know the ones.
They prop up the bar complaining about things that don’t actually
happen. ‘So there was this Muslim bus driver who refused to let a old woman on
board because she was wearing a cross’ or ‘some council has banned Christmas
because it’ll offend the Hindus’ or ‘And of course all you need to do is walk
into the dole office with a slight limp and you’re on disability benefits for
life’ and so on and so on.
The last law I can remember being
formulated in response to golfclubman (as I like to call him) was the poll tax
which was introduced to Parliament in response to a lot of dreary moaning about
the rates and so the incompetently unfair poll tax was brought in and, in the
fullness of time, destroyed Margaret Thatcher as a political force.
For those of you too young to remember the
rates, they were a local tax which was set according to the value of the
property. They had a weird fascination
for a certain type of small-minded person who used their status as a payer to
somehow suggest that their opinions carried more weight than others. A local group where I live, the Jesmond
Residents Association (whose sole raison d’être
as far as I can make out is to ensure that we never again have a chippy in
the area) was originally the Jesmond Ratepayers Association. And the main opposition to the Greenham
Common Peace Camp was a group calling itself Ratepayers Against the Greenham
Encampment (or R.A.G.E., see what they did there?) thus announcing that their
status as payers of a local land tax gave their views greater weight than those
of equally effected residents who did not (eg dependents, students, children,
the unemployed etc) and while there were issues around Greenham Common* it
seems strange that greater weight to the debate should have been given to those
who paid the rates. It’s as if they were
still smarting from the removal of the householder qualification from those eligible
to vote.
*the
most bigoted people it has been my misfortune to meet have been a couple of BNP
skinheads I once advised in the police cells and a Greenham Common veteran
Personally, rather than criminalise the squatters,
I would increase council powers to claim properties abandoned or forgotten by
their owners and put to use as social housing.
But then that would be a step towards the alleviation of poverty and, as
the last two governments have made abundantly clear, being poor is a lifestyle
choice that should not be encouraged.
And I suppose that putting squatters in prison is one way of solving homelessness.
