Freedom – Criminalisation and then?
26 May
Published in the May edition of Freedom newspaper
On Tuesday 27 March, the House of Lords passed the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, sending it back to the House of Commons.1 This event, pretty much unreported in the mainstream press, caused waves in the squat scene since section 145 of the bill proposes to criminalise squatting in residential buildings. As SQUASH (Squatters Action for Secure Homes) commented “the proposed legislation will have impacts on the most vulnerable people in society, will empower unscrupulous landlords and will burden the justice system, police and charities”.2
A report by SQUASH has made it clear that the cost of criminalisation will dwarf any presumed benefits.3 Presumably most people reading this will agree that criminalisation is a step in the wrong direction and much has already been written about the legislation in general terms so in this short piece we aim to focus specifically on the impacts for political activism.
Occupation as resistance takes many forms. Recently, perhaps because squatting has been under threat, there have been plenty of actions – Cardiff has a new social centre (the Red and Black Umbrella)4, the previously rented Forest Cafe was squatted in Edinburgh5, the Hinkley Barnstormers drew attention to the planned construction of a new nuclear power station in the West Country6, the Citadel of Hope (an old Salvation Army hall) was cracked in Sheffield7 and campaigners replaced a phased out homeless shelter with a squatted project in Brighton.
Alongside these great initiatives, there have been plenty of illegal evictions of other projects. In London, the School of Ideas was illegally evicted the same night as the St.Pauls occupation, and then quickly demolished.8 Previously, a freshly squatted Iraqi bank (empty since 1994) had been evicted by chainsaw wielding cops who pretended the building was in diplomatic use and thus the Section 6 was subject to legal exemption.9 In Lancaster, Occupy squatters took a building and were illegally evicted soon after.10 Squats have also been illegally evicted in Brighton, Bristol and Peckham.11/12/13
This only serves to indicate that political squatting is already difficult in this country and a proposed law change will not have much impact. Just as those desperately in need of a place to sleep will still enter derelict buildings, activists will still use the empties – there’s more than enough to go round in this time of austerity. Only a small percentage of Britain’s estimated 720,000 empty buildings are actually squatted.14
A group of squatters recently opened a shop in Brighton, selling fruit and veg by donation. It’s been wildly popular and shows what can be done with the empty properties blighting every high street. Of course the shop is zoned commercial, not residential (although it comprises one land registry item with the flat upstairs) so it would be “safe” under the proposed legislation.
It remains to be seen how residential will eventually be defined and as a supposed legal brain said recently “that there will at some point be an offence of squatting in commercial buildings […] seems inevitable. The question is simply how soon.”15 Stand by for smear stories in the media about raves and dangerous artists using warehouses.
If we take a brief look at Europe, in Spain, squatting was criminalised in the late 1990s and interestingly, the numbers of squats subsequently increased. The law appears to be unenforceable, with only a few cases being brought so far. In the Netherlands, the squat ban introduced in October 2010 only seems at present to be being applied in Amsterdam, where nevertheless new squats are still being opened, such as the Valreep social centre.16 It has been subject to various legal challenges.
Here, Mike Weatherley17 and other opportunistic politicians will now most likely move on to their next chance to grab the limelight. The law will become law, but slowly and with many challenges.
Meanwhile the squatters will keep on squatting. In London we do not expect the Met to bother with squats more than usual, they’ve got bigger fish to fry, although social centres and the like will still receive undue attention. In Brighton we expect the police to be all over this new law, and a lot to hinge on interpretations of how exactly “residential” is defined.
So as far as we get into it in this short article, the impending criminalisation of squatting in residential buildings appears not to change very much. We expect some confrontations, but as you can see, those battles are already being waged. Once squatters are illegalised, despite broad public sympathy they will soon be portrayed as domestic extremists / terrorists, the ‘bad’ activists as opposed to the ‘good’. This may sound paranoid, but there are already precedents, such as the Bloomsbury Social Centre being profiled by the Met’s SO15 Counter Terrorism unit.18
In the meantime squatting offers us all a chance to contest definitions of public space and to establish autonomous spaces from which to organise. Whether these spaces are defined as illegal or not seems quite frankly irrelevant. Keep on squatting!
Word Count: 835
REFERENCES
1
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2010-12/legalaidsentencingandpunishmentofoffenders/documents.html
2
http://www.squashcampaign.org/
3
http://www.squashcampaign.org/2012/03/cost-of-new-squatting-law-could-be-790m/
4
http://redandblackumbrella.squat.net/
5
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/12/489555.html
6
http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/content/hinkley-point-barnstormers-occupiers-aim-stop-edf-land-trash-video-and-flyer
7
http://en.squat.net/2011/12/29/6150/
8
http://occupylsx.org/?p=3815
9
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/protesters-evicted-from-building-linked-to-iraqi-embassy-6295728.html
10
www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/occupy_campaigners_angry_at_police_arrests_1_4132436
11
http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/04/494570.html
12
http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/04/494655.html
13
http://en.squat.net/2012/03/10/london-100-police-illegally-evict-social-centre/
14
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/criminalising-squatting-is-the-real-crime/
15
http://www.estatesgazette.com/blogs/property-law/2011/10/residential-squatting-criminalised—is-commercial-far-behind.html
16
http://valreep.wordpress.com
17
http://www.mikeweatherleymp.com/photos/iron-maiden/
18
http://en.squat.net/2012/01/26/london-student-centre-branded-terrorist/