The police called some of them “scum”. Many of them who are not already among Britain’s tens of thousands of homeless people will shortly become so, following today’s ratification of Clause 26 of the Legal Aid bill, which criminalises squatting in empty houses.
And yet, as officers moved in against the impromptu demonstration outside Parliament on Monday night — dragging and forcibly removing many — the demonstrators sat down, linked arms and sang “Happy Birthday”. “It’s one way to defuse a situation like that,” said a 26-year old squatter, who did not want to give his name.
The passing of this amendment, tabled in the face of overwhelming public pressure, means that most of the 20,000 citizens who currently live in empty or abandoned housing stock in Britain will be forced to choose between homelessness and a criminal record — maximum sentence is a year’s jailtime and a £5,000 fine.
I have written before about the misrepresentation of squatting in the press, but given that there are over half a million empty properties in Britain, half a million “hidden homeless”, five million people currently on the housing list and tens of thousands more facing homelessness as a result of government cuts to housing benefit, according to leading homelessness charities, it should be a point of outrage on the left that the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have thrown their support behind the anti-squatting amendment.
This, however, is a campaign that has, from the start, been about turning the property-owning middle classes against the poor.
The tabloid narrative, pushed most heavily by the Evening Standard, has been that decent, hardworking homeowners come home from holiday and find their houses invaded by filthy reprobates who are somehow protected by law from being evicted. In fact, in the few incidents where occupied buildings are squatted, there is already legislation in place to criminalise those who threaten homeowners in this way, under the terms of the Criminal Law Act 1977.
This new amendment would make it an offence to squat any empty residential building — even if it has been abandoned for years. With rents going up, wages going down and homelessness a very real possibility for tens of thousands of people, one can understand why a government determined not to actually fund infrastructure investments like housing projects would want to stop desperate people getting any ideas.
Actual cases of hostile home takeovers are incredibly few and far between. A government consultation on the proposed changes to the law found that out of thousands of respondents, over 90 per cent agreed that no changes were necessary, whilst just ten wrote in to say that they had been “victims” of squatting.
Most squatters do not pose a threat to ordinary homeowners, but they are a potential embarrassment to a government whose best response to the housing crisis is to make homelessness illegal, which is rather like solving a food shortage by making hunger illegal.
Squatting an empty property is an act of defiance, a reclamation of psychic space, and it is no accident that police have focused on raiding squats and other “alternative” communities while searching for dissidents and student protesters this year. Many, although by no means all, squats have become centres for alternative thought, in which people attempt to live outside of the restrictions of capital and consumerism, building new kinds of community. Most have no more illicit aims than running free mother-and-toddler yoga sessions for local residents, but that’s exactly the kind of Big Society organisation that’s punishable by a night in the cells in David Cameron’s Britain.
Squatting is an ancient right, enshrined in the British tradition of the Commons — or it was, until today. In Cameron’s Britain, there is no room for diggers and dreamers, no space for the destitute and homeless who make lives for themselves in the cracks between capitalism. The confiscation of that right will make thousands homeless, for no better reason than spite.
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