Guest post : But I’m not a squatter... | UK Uncut
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Criminalising squatting may at first glance seem not to hold pressing relevance for the majority of the population. However, the attack on squatting needs to be viewed as part of the larger assault by the rich and privileged on the rest of society. Already there are around 5 million people stewing on council house waiting lists. As the housing benefit cuts bite, a leaked letter from Eric Pickles to the PM revealed that the government expects another 40,000 families to be forced into homelessness. At the same time, the budgets of homelessness providers are being slashed, with night shelters losing around 30% of their government funding. Job losses, combined with the overinflated mortgage lending of the boom years, means that more and more people simply cannot afford their mortgage repayments, and the Central Bank has warned of a “tsunami” of repossessions. Already 2 million people can only keep up with their rent or their mortgage payments with credit cards.
Such is the nature of the housing crisis that we are in. Particularly in inner-city areas, keeping a roof over your head is becoming simply unaffordable for many people. And now on top of this, the government seeks to criminalise one means of dealing with this crisis. For many, squatting is a last resort, state processes being unable to provide them with an adequate home. Furthermore, like housing benefit, squatting gives people a little more freedom to choose where they live, counteracting the ghettoization tendencies of our housing market. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Tories have made it quite clear that they do not find such ghettoization problematic at all, and the criminalisation of squatting taken together with cuts to housing benefit and the end of secure tenancies may be seen as part of a policy of “suburbanisation of the poor” – leaving the city centre to those who can afford it. The law is supposed to protect the weak from the strong: the criminalisation of squatting will do precisely the opposite.