This is a guest post by Zelda Jeffers, a member of Basildon Uncut. Basildon Uncut is joining others at a march to Dale Farm from 1pm on Saturday 10 September, starting at Wickford train station, half an hour from London Liverpool St.

While activists across the country have been taking action against the cuts, our local council in Essex has managed to get hold of £18 million to evict a local community from their own land and make them homeless.

Dale Farm is Europe's largest Traveller community, and one that has been under constant threat of eviction. It is probably most famous for being featured on the TV hit "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding", but its claim to fame might change if Basildon Council gets its way.

Ignoring pleas from the United Nations and Amnesty International, Basildon Borough Council has set aside £9.2 million for the eviction operation - more than a third of its budget. Essex police have obtained another £10 million from the Home Office and Basildon Council to cover what they expect to be a three week battle with five hundred resisting residents and supporters.

Basildon Council are axing local services and jobs to pay for making 50 families homeless. The Council is claiming that they are protecting the Green Belt from the Travellers - ignoring that it was a scrapyard when the Travellers bought the land and cleaned it up. Ironically, the eviction costs are being blamed as one of the reasons why Basildon Council is controversially selling off our well used and loved playing fields and parkland, and allowing developers to build on them to increase their value.

We've been asked to pay for the financial crisis caused by the banks, and now we're being asked to pay in order to deliberately make people homeless. £505,000 is being cut to disabled services, and 100 Basildon Council jobs are likely to be axed to help the local authority cope with budget cuts which will leave it £2.3 million short. Spending £18 million on evicting families from their own land when we can't find the funds to keep nurseries, libraries and youth centres open shows something has gone terribly wrong. The excuse for this outrage is that it's about ‘upholding the law’. But the law isn't being applied equally. According to the Commission for Racial Equality, more than 90% of Traveller planning applications are initially rejected compared to 20% overall. The council demands that Travellers move to authorised pitches, but they refuse to make any available. So what is this about? It's about ethnic cleansing, and Basildon council wants us, the local people, to foot the bill.

This is a guest post by Rueben Taylor, a campaigner with SQUASH (Squatters' Action for Secure Homes). You can follow them on Twitter @Squash_campaign.



The Coalition government has announced its intention to criminalise squatting. This will be deeply detrimental to social justice, culture and civil liberties, especially in the context of the cuts. We are currently in the process of a consultation exercise, in which they solicit opinions and then try to bury the results in the bottom drawer of a civil servant’s desk and proceed to behave exactly as they had planned in the first place. We need to make sure this does not happen, and to do so we need you to respond to the consultation and send us a copy of your response. We also call on groups opposing the cuts – whether at your local library or on the high street – to use occupation as a tactic: to take and defend space against the violence of the cuts, and resist the creeping privatisation of everything.

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.

As well as being an emergency housing option for many, squatting makes an important contribution to arts and culture. Making enough money to survive as an artist is a formidable task, especially while maintaining independence of creative expression. Squatting can give artists time and space in which to work, exhibit, and perform. As arts bodies are having their budgets slashed and are increasingly unable to support creative innovation, this time and space is essential to the vibrancy – perhaps even the survival - of arts and culture in the UK.

Even in terms of the government’s own cost-cutting agenda, the criminalisation of squatting makes no sense. Adjudication of disputes would be left in the hands of an already overstretched police force, who would be required to intervene in situations which are currently civil disputes. And as the cases brought would now be criminal rather than civil, the squatters would become eligible for legal aid, despite recent government attempts to secure the reverse. The state will also be required to pay the costs of prosecution, where previously these fell to the property-owner. In effect, it is the nationalisation of the risks of property-ownership: just as the banking bailout was a nationalisation of the risks of wild gambling. It turns the state into a protection racket for property speculators, without any consideration of the attendant responsibilities that come with ownership.

One of the scariest aspects of these proposals, is their devastating impact on our civil liberties. Occupation is, as UKUncut-ers know well, a key tactic of civil disobedience and protest. Whether in a workplace, in a university, or in the foyer of a shop, occupation has a long and proud history of success - as economic disruption, as an appeal to the wider public, and as a way of opening up spaces for alternative modes of organisation. Under the proposals currently outlined in the government’s consultation, it is likely that it would be made a criminal offence to refuse to leave a building when asked to do so. That means the police force would have full powers to come in and arrest everyone taking part in a university occupation. As the government acknowledges itself, it is very difficult to determine where “occupation” ends and “squatting” begins. They propose to distinguish “protestors” from “squatters”, but undoubtedly many squatters would view themselves as engaged in a protest against existing inequalities of land and property distribution. Making occupation illegal will fundamentally undermine our civil liberties and divest us of an essential weapon of dissent.

The consultation will finish on 5th October. If you only have a few minutes, please use the consultation response tool with the most essential questions to register your opinion, which will soon be live on our website. If you have a bit longer you can read SQUASH’s full guidelines here. And if you’d like to find out more about getting involved with the campaign, email us : info [at] squashcampaingn [dot] org. Thanks.

As if it wasn't content with protests over just one corporate sponsor, Tate has just announced a sponsorship deal with... Vodafone!

Today marks the launch of the Vodafone-branded 'Tate Debates'. The official topic is 'Should museums make apps?', but one can think of more appropriate questions: 'Is it OK to dodge a £6bn tax bill at a time when our schools, libraries and hospitals are closing?' or 'Is it OK for one of the country's best loved art institutions to be taking money from tax-dodging corporations?'

Maybe Tate will get a few reminders that Vodafone's tax dodge could pay for the the cut in Arts Council funding 60 times over.



Get over to the Tate Debate website and have your say by leaving comments via the form at the bottom of the page.

Update: the comments are already coming in...



“I am an app developer, I have published apps and I do this for a professional living.

We have been in discussion with numerous art institutions / partnerships in the North West about producing apps. There is a massive wealth of information sitting there which could be utilised and shared through out the world. Galleries, museums and other institutions have been digitising their assets for years in an expectance of platforms like these.

Its a shame there really is no money to do anything anymore. These institutions now have to worry about keeping staff employed, the lights on and the general costs of keeping and bring in exhibitions and the like.

The real discussion should be “If Vodafone and others paid their true tax liabilities could museums then afford to produce apps”

“I am not happy with the framing of the debate. I am sure art and culture can be experienced through a mobile phone. But why single out this tool, capable of transmitting sound, images and text?

Is it because a wealthy sponsor – Vodafone – wants you to ask?

Vodafone must be considered a toxic brand, up there with BP. Oh, they sponsor you as well.

Perhaps the better question to ask is: do the arts have to suffer severely limiting underfunding while companies like Vodafone treat our system with contempt, refusing to pay their full whack of tax, and then assuming it can appropriate the arts to ameliorate the toxicity of its brand.

Shame on the Tate management. You are dining in the trough of the capitalist pigs. You are demeaning your audience by expecting us to participate in this sordid little arrangement you have with this tax dodging multinational corporation. It’s artless and degrading: for you, for the artists who show in your spaces and for the public.

Please stop it. No to any mobile phone apps born of vodafone’s desire to improve its image at the Tate’s and the Tate’s audience’s expense.

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