Traveling around the world overland very slowly is a pretty incredible cultural experience – you get to see something of the planet and her people every inch of the way – you also bring something of your own culture with you. What I didn’t expect is that, in the time that we’re away, my way of life back home, has been criminalized and from today I can be thrown in jail for doing something I’ve been doing for twenty years. This isn’t some little hobby or other that we’re talking about, that has fallen under health and safety laws, say, or legislated out of existence. This is about how you choose to live, where you live and the people you live with, and it’s a full scale attack on a whole class of people. They have made squatting [in a residential property] criminally illegal; a little piece of the English culture that travels with me has died.
I’d like to expand on this whole topic – you know; the history; the present situation; talk about the common misconceptions and cover the issues; the reasons why squatting is beneficial to society and the reasons why, one day, it will save the planet. Soon I will and post it all here – until then I just want to say I am very, very sad, disappointed and thinking about my friends and family, and the thousands of people back home who woke up last week to find they were criminals.
Back in April 2010, we left the UK a few weeks before the General Election that brought in the first Conservative government for 13 years. We joked that we wouldn’t return until they had gone and the ever-so-slightly nicer Labour Party had been re-installed. Not so much joking now…
[I would just like to add that this one day it will all be legal again; you can’t keep a good idea down and you can’t kill the Spirit – below are some links to some of the campaigns against this completely daft law-change: Fight the Good Fight!
http://evictionresistance.blogspot.com/
http://www.squashcampaign.org/ ]
