Ha ha! Here is a good article on it - couple years old but... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-53579/Squatter-owner-100-000-flat.html Squatter becomes owner of £100,000 flat Struggling artist Jack Blackburn yesterday became the owner of the £100,000 council flat he had squatted in for 13 years View on www.dailymail.co.uk Preview by Yahoo
________________________________ From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 4:26 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Why do people sound American when they sing in English? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote : you will have to explain that to us crass and crude Americans, I never heard of such doings as this - and it was legal at one time? Who changed the law and why wasn't it illegal to begin with? We've always done it MJ, until recently anyway, it's a way of housing the homeless or feeding yourself in critical times. But squatting empty buildings became really popular in the 1960's because of the housing crisis, I have no idea when the laws were agreed but there was a statement you put on the door of the house you let yourself into stating that it was now your home and there was basically nothing they could do about it, except go to court to have you removed, which generally took ages. To put it into perspective, my town has 30% of it's houses empty for 10 months of the year and yet there are homeless people sleeping rough everywhere. This sort of imbalance in wealth is very bad for society and the government doesn't give a damn, they actively make it worse in fact. So squatting was a good idea but it did attract a lot of the wrong types who ruined peoples houses. The way things are swinging politically it couldn't last. everyone tries to out fascist the other guy these days. The people I knew in squats were either paying off student debts or anarchist types living cheap and avoiding officialdom. We ran an environmental action group from our pub as well as having awesome parties and plotted the overthrow of Maggie Thatcher, but I went to travel the world before they built the barricades. It was good clean fun and no one got hurt or even disadvantaged much. But it's all been illegal since a few years ago, the verminous Tories won't let their rich friends be inconvenienced in any way so they stopped it. London belongs to oligarchs now, the rich have won the class war and there's no way to live except by paying vast rent to private landlords or buying a place if you're lucky. I don;t know why there hasn't been a revolution in the last few years, probably because everyone is kept passive by low wages and good quality TV. And there's no good role models. Russell Brand is the best they've got these days and he's a multi millionaire. But you'd never get away with it now with our easily abused anti - terror laws and government monitoring. ________________________________ From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, October 20, 2014 3:24 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Why do people sound American when they sing in English? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Sorry - I replied too fast. Re "Still there?": No, we stayed at the squat for two years then we got a letter from the owner saying that he was returning from Africa, that he'd heard the place was occupied, and could we please vacate the premises shortly. We did exactly that - so he never lost out from us using his house and we left it in good order. Would all be illegal now of course but was still allowed then. And we thought at the time that we were just continuing the Levellers work . . . Excellent, a lot of my friends did squatting and they always looked after the places. We all ended up in a nice empty pub once and planned our anti-poll tax campaign from the saloon bar. Ah, happy days. Am currently squatting a bit of land and have divided it up between friends into allotments. Worked well for a few years but interest is waning and the place is getting overgrown, great sense of achievement when we started though. We were the new diggers. Shame it's all illegal now, kids these days don't know what they're missing!
