It’s a beautiful day! That should be a good thing shouldn’t it?
Well, if you are autistic and you live in an urbanised (and gentrified) seaside town and it is the weekend, it really isn’t. I will be trapped in my own home today and that ain’t fun. The views from my windows are grim, high density housing squeezed in amongst Victoriana and lovely weather means cars with wound down windows, not great if they are replete with mobile pa systems in place of a car stereo; and this self imprisonment is my best option.
It will be hell out there today, Sunday in Shoreditch by the sea, the seafront cafe blaring music and spreading its furniture along the lower prom and beach like a tacky dayglo tumour, the upper promenade will be a rat run for cyclists, badly trained dogs and families walking four abreast so you are forced into the cycle lane and get abuse hurled at you… and then there are the motorbikes. If I were to have a tattoo, it would read “L’enfer c’est les autres!” Hell is indeed other people.
It is actually painful for someone with autism to be exposed to all this, not only does it hurt our ears and cause anxiety, panic and trigger meltdowns and shutdowns, it has a knock on effect for days to come.
Today won’t be wasted though, I am aware of the damage this can all cause and regretfully take precautions but it is important to acknowledge how disabling it all is. In Britain today, my own government is actively trying to belittle those with problems that are “just in our heads” and are laying out a strategy to rob us of vitally needed support. Because a bunch of greedy, dead behind the eyes and dead inside the soul tories want someone to blame, they have picked those with ‘invisible’ conditions as the perfect diversion.
I lead an incredibly limited life and while I make up for it in terms of creativity and a better than average ability to express myself due to hyperlexia, it is still necessary to acknowledge that the world I live in disables me. I only wish the government and the kind of bovine minded fools that read the right wing press would at least leave the likes of me alone.
Tomorrow will be better as most people will be back at work but it’s also expected to rain too… Erm, yay?
You can read more about my experiences of autism here.
I just came back from an aborted walk along the sea front because at the end of April, at midday, it was seven degrees and blowing a gale… and in my local park, people were living in tents. If I turned the camera around from the above photo you would see a line of fancy cars, Teslas, Range Rovers and even a four by four Porsche, many of these also had personalised number plates too. Behind the cars, many of the buildings had scaffolding up them, ready for a coat of the ubiquitous heritage paint that marks yet another house being gentrified and removed from the budgets of those that grew up here who live in slums on the edges of town and now in tents in the park.
This is what this nation has become, a polarised land of the obscenely wealthy and the shamefully poor.
The four by fours are telling too; the rich’s solution to the crumbling roads and infrastructure. Why fix the country with fair taxes when you can buy yourself out of any inconvenience this society has caused?
After five years of delays and persistent watering down, the amendments tabled today to the Renters Reform Bill have made it effectively worthless, meaning that it will provide no extra security or stability for tenants. As of today, all the major housing charities in the UK, including Acorn and the Renters Reform coalition, have withdrawn their support and cooperation from the government’s bill.
This situation has hardly come as a surprise, particularly as 1 in 5 Conservative MPs are landlords themselves, as are many of their target voters.
There is one ray of sunshine to this situation in that as most Conservative voters are over the age of seventy and those under forty have been robbed of the chance of buying a home because there is no money left to pay for a deposit on a house because it’s all going on extortionate rents, their voting block and dying out and there will be few smug homeowners left to replace them.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
You can read about my experience of the housing crisis here.
Five years ago today the Renter’s Reform Bill was introduced to Parliament with a view to sorting out the utter carnage that is the United Kingdom’s rental sector. It’s primary focus was to redress the power imbalance favouring landlords that happened in 1997 when section 21 of the Housing Act became law… The infamous ‘No fault’ evection legislation brought in at the request of the banking sector so that borrowers could take out mortgages on properties that they planned to rent out, safe in the knowledge that a tenant could be thrown out within a couple of months for no other reason than ‘because’.
You can do a lot in five years, you can conceive and bring a child to the point that you could have a vaguely intelligible conversation with them, you can see a blockbuster movie from an idea on a scrap of paper, through castings, pre production, filming, editing, post-productions, soundtrack scoring, to a premier, you can create a ‘triple A’ video game, build a cruise liner and all manner of things. In the last five years I have made at least 250 artworks, knitted about forty garments, moved house, lost a mother, lost a friend, gained a great nephew, made four books and am currently finalising a fifth and, in all this time, what has happened with this parliamentary bill? Bugger all, that’s what!
It is no secret that at least a third of the ruling political party are landlords, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer down to lowly back benchers, the Tories are coining it in off the labour of others in the form of rental income, as are many of their voters; why would a turkey vote for Christmas? The Renter’s Reform Bill has met nothing but obstacles at every stage of its slow progress through Westminster and it’s been watered down at every opportunity to the point that it is hardly worth bothering with and it is now reaching the stage where a new government will come in and it will just vanish along with any other unpassed legislation.
Will the Tories mark two (What is left of the Labour Party) do anything for renters? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that they are clearly in the pay of big business and they seem to be focused on meeting the needs of the highest bidder rather than the most needy and I don’t see them being any different in this manner than any other.
Today is not a day for candles and cake, five years of poverty, fear and vulnerability is not a cause for celebration… let’s hope we aren’t in the same boat in five more.
You can buy Roof-Less my illustrated book about the housing crisis here.
It’s been a rough couple of months; It’s been a rough decade, truth be told. This, though, is something I can’t really solve (although someone pointed out a pattern to my current problem that might solve itself, given time) Anyway, one thing you learn after going through years of trauma and that is, if you want to keep your friends, you need to make use of mental health services from time to time. And so, I had to make a couple of phone calls today. I spoke to one service and it seems that I’ve fallen off their ‘books’ because they hadn’t seen or heard from me for a while…
There used to be a time where if you’d been quiet, you would get checked on, you’d get a phone call to see if you were okay. Now, it’s seen as a reason to put your file in cold storage and bump you off the live cases system… (Probably not the best turn of phrase, thinking about it.) Part of the problem is that many support services now want to see groups of people at the same time which is absolutely useless if you are autistic. Neurotypicals feel better for socialising and group activities are viewed as beneficial for their mental health, for autistic people, it can have the exact opposite affect.
What I need is someone I can talk to with whom I don’t have to regurgitate all my history of horrendous occurrences and all the reasons why what has just happened has knocked me off my perch. (one of) The problems with someone like me is if you have spoken to enough mental health professionals, you spot when some rookie is using their newly acquired skills on you; I don’t need someone to repeat back exactly what I’ve told them in a slightly different order. Sometimes you need someone to acknowledge how awful things are, sometimes you need someone to make you laugh and today I just needed a neutral party to acknowledge that I’m not going mad and a situation has been as awful as I’m thinking it was / is. And yes, the situation is awful, the person causing it is out of order and I am right to have been upset by it.
I have been gaslit in the past, including by the person causing me problems right now and once that has happened to you, you end up being unsure of everything; I needed a second opinion and I got it.
So after finding out that I’d been put in suspended animation at the mental health drop in, I thought I’d better get a proper check up from the neck up and book myself a mental health review at the doctors, only to discover that I have to now ring back tomorrow at 8am for a pre-booked appointment in two weeks time… There is even a mad scramble to talk to the mental health nurse it seems.
The thing I have come to realise since my autism diagnosis is that I would be perfectly fine if I didn’t have to engage with this world or indeed, the people in it and it’s other people’s untreated mental health problems that cause me more trouble than anything else. Whether it’s the sociopathy, psychopathy or narcism of politicians or the borderline personality disorder and covert narcissism of people closer to home, it’s their unwillingness to get themselves treated that causes no end of hurt to myself and everyone else.
I’ve been reading the new book by housing lawyer and activist Nick Bano, rather obviously titled “Against Landlords”… Can you guess what it’s about?
I was listening to Nick speak on ‘Politics Joe’ and learnt a few things, not enough to make me want to update my own book but enough to make me stump up the cash for a copy.
I keep thinking how one of the leaders of my local tenant union is close friends with an intentional landlord and this fact absolutely boggles my mind. I have heard this person trying to justify their parasitical property empire and I instantly thought of the excuses made about George Washington being a ‘good’ slave owner.
There are some words that are mutually exclusive and ‘good’ in combination with either ‘slave owner’ or “landlord’ falls into this category. Profiting from as situation where you get your assets paid for and looked after by the labour of another human being is a parasitical way to live and giving oneself airs and graces on top of that by having the gall to declare yourself a ‘good’ person or indeed landlord for doing so says exactly the opposite; some better and more accurate words would be ‘arrogant’ ‘deluded’ or ‘narcissistic’.
However nice a landlord might be; if you actively went out and bought a property for the sole purpose of renting it out, you have robbed a potential homeowner of the chance to own their own forever home. Trying to make out that you are doing that for the good of society is both cowardly and deceitful.
Which brings me to my next issue; What if you are a close friend of someone like that? Imagine if you go ’round their house for dinner or you meet them for coffee. That food, that hot beverage, that slice of cake they treated you to has been paid for from someone else’s hard earned money… and you are complicit in that act. You are just as guilty, in your own way, as your parasitical chum.
So how can someone complicit in bleeding renters dry be the voice of a tenant’s union? How can they wear their logo, wave their flags and sign up others to a cause that they themselves are betraying? I’m sure they have their excuses prepared and would slate someone like myself as a nutter as they roll their eyes to gain ascent for their opinion. It doesn’t stop it being true though and they will have to live with that while I shall sleep soundly at night.
The myth of the good landlord is just that, a myth, and if you buy into it you are at best a fool and potentially as bad as they are.
From the moment I moved into my last flat, it leaked. It was one of those intermittent things where the wind had to be blowing in a certain direction for the rain to get in. Every now and then a ‘handyman’ (well at least the gender bit was accurate, I guess) went up on the roof and poked about a bit and pronounced it ‘fixed’. It was to do with the victorian chimney stack waggling about in the wind, sealant was added, lead flashing shoved back into place and pointing redone but when the wind blew and the rain rained, the leak started again. It was right over where the kettle and the toaster stood. There were barely any electrical sockets and the few that there were were all in dumb places and so I ran extension leads everywhere. I would wake up some mornings and find all the power was dead because the water had leaked into the electrics again.
It’s amazing what becomes normal if you deal with it for long enough. Like the two ring, two bar camping stove I cooked on for a decade or having to move all the electric goods whenever it rained. I ignored the ladybirds after a while too, they nested in the gaps and the rot of the sash windows and head butted the lampshades every evening. My landlady gave up the ghost with the safety measures brought in after the Grenfell fire and after her (not very) handyman put on a fire door and a closing mechanism that could tear your arm out of its socket she promptly sold up… Except that covid hit and everything stopped.
What didn’t stop though was the rain and without any maintenance I eventually came home to find the ceiling on the floor… The landlady did nothing or course, as she had about the rest of the squalor. Even the toilet bowl was cracked and had been leaking for the past few years.
It took a lot of effort on my part to get some backup at the time and it came in the strangest of ways; a preliminary diagnosis of autism. This allowed me access to adult social services and eventually the Homeworks housing charity who instantly got in touch with another organisation with serious legal people. One of the first thing they did was have a guy from the council come ’round and he made a list…
I lived in a house of multiple occupation, which meant that certain rules had to be adhered to for a landlord to be allowed to throw out tenants. In a rather perverse situation, the property had to be up to a suitable standard before you can be thrown out of it… And no, this is not me getting around to my April fool joke a couple of days late. It also delayed any paperwork because if you try and evict someone after the council have issued an order of works, it is regarded as retribution (although only for a few month) and so… finally, things started to get fixed.
By the time I was evicted, not only did I have a new ceiling and a new toilet, I also had (at vast expense) a special socket to wire in an electric cooker… Not that there was any point buying one as it would be another thing to have to move.
I’m not sure what the point of telling you about this was except to highlight the absurdity and possibly hypocrisy of the situation as regards to housing regulations. So much effort is put into the absurdities of things whilst, at the same time, horrors are normalised. The ending of this story was, in all likelihood, everything was torn out again the second I left the flat and frankly, I would sooner have had all that money for a deposit… But that would have made sense wouldn’t it? We can’t be having that can we? Not in this country.
This one is a bit of a two parter as questions go… I think it’s best to start with the first part and I suspect you may know what the second part will be by then…
I have asked myself this question constantly since March 2003 but it’s only over the past 7 years that it has become much more personal and more nuanced.
“Do bad people know they are bad? Do evil people know they are evil?”
I gave up smoking on the 19th of March 2003, it was the only thing I could do to stop the Iraq war. Isn’t that pathetic? I figured that it was the least I could do to deny the government of that tax money in case some of it went towards killing some poor sod in George W Bush’s quest to finish what his daddy started. I often wonder if Tony Blair knowns what he is, does he roll out of bed in the morning and think, “f%%k me! Did I kill a lot of people?” Clearly not, as his actions since are those of someone who regards themselves as a great statesperson rather than the war criminal that everyone outside of his close circle thinks him to be. That is part of question too I guess… is good subjective? Depending on who you speak to. Or is it that people specifically choose who they speak to so as to elicit the desired response? If that is the case though, do people know they are doing that? Do they hang around with those that will reinforce their conformation bias as a means to safeguard their self image? We are definitely into ‘inception’ territory here aren’t we?
I have had a lot of bad and evil done to me over the years and it is still happening. I could never have imagined that sham medical assessor Atos and the Work Capability Assessment could be unleashed on the sick and disabled and I am still amazed now about how few care or even remember the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people under the first wave of Tory austerity. The man in charge throughout this, Iain Duncan Smith, clearly thinks that he is a thoroughly decent human being, so much so that not only did he insist that protesters calling him ‘Tory Scum’ were arrested, charged and brought to trial but that they be tried again when the first trial found them innocent. The amusing upshot is that after the second trial upheld the defendants’ description of Smith as ‘Tory Scum’ we can all call him the same. Thanks Iain!
I’ve had evil upon evil done to me and everyone else for as long as I can remember, from Thatcher onwards, the Conservative party have torn this country to shreds. Do they know they are evil? Again, they band together with likeminded folks to justify their appalling actions. To the Tories, evil is contextual, they ‘other’ the rest of the population and tell themselves that they deserve their success and it had nothing to do with family money, school connections or some other systemic unfairness.
When I was being thrown out of my home I couldn’t believe just how many people would happily sign up to work for letting agents and do the bidding of greedy, vile, people. I would be threatened by court orders just because I didn’t want to vacate my home during covid in the coldest months because some potential buyer wanted to poke around in my home of 13 years that they only saw as a money making opportunity.
Most evil or wrong doing seems to be diluted in some way or another, the estate agents, the surveyors, the builders and trades people that make a living working for these people all make up little excuses in their heads to tell themselves that they are ok people. They can point a finger at someone else up the food chain and tell themselves that they are the bad guy, not them.
I wonder how that applies to the property developer that gutted the entire building around me over 6 or more months (I’ve blotted a lot of this out). He knew my mother had just died and he threw me out of my home because he saw he could make a lot more money if he jammed in a second bedroom; sure, there would be partition walls halfway across windows and rooms in perma-darkness but… money. he really liked money. He exposed me to constant noise and torment for all that time, invaded my space and poisoned my lungs when I should have been grieving for my loss in peace. If done out of sheer spite, that’s a prison sentence, if done as he did it, he’s an entrepreneur. Evil is indeed a matter of context.
I have had awful things done to me by those that know me for even less and those events hurt even more. I have been cheated on, lied to, had people try and intimidate me on the internet (hence no comments) and in the real world. Partly through this annoyingly autistic habit of speaking the truth and partly through the blowback of someone trying to cover their tracks whilst two-timing me. Was evil intended? I don’t think so, but it happened regardless. The concept of good and evil gets very muddied when the notion of virtue signalling comes into play. I was attacked by people who live in the most ostentatious house in their street, Where everyone around them scrapes by as renters in one floor as a flat, they own an entire building and yet woe betide anyone that questions their socialist credibility. Hypocrisy comes into much of this; homeowners gentrifying the area, championing renters rights after they have indirectly caused their plight in the first place, anti capitalists with awfully nice homes and cars and the fanciest of houses in the fanciest of areas, environmental campaigners who jump on a short hall flight at the first opportunity. It’s amazing just how quickly these people will turn on a disabled person who has suffered at the hands of the Tories, the Department of Work and Pensions and bad landlords when their left wing values are put into question.
The reason I put myself through hell to write a book about my experience of the housing crisis was to put a human face on it. Most evil is carried out through ‘othering’ as mentioned above. It’s easy to take someone’s money away if you tell yourself that they are lazy, it’s easy to move into an already crowded area and force the prices up if you tell yourself that you are improving the area, it’s easier to put up rents or force people out on the streets if you can tell yourself that you worked harder or they are lesser people. I wanted to show that you can be a tea total, drug free, hardworking, ‘decent’ human being and have your life utterly destroyed by a combination of bad luck and greed, there is not much in the way of those but the most dedicated of fascists or the most rabid of capitalists who could claim that I in any way brought my situation upon myself. Not that, in a fair and just society, those things I described should mean anything but, sadly, they do, everyone deserves a safe and warm home, they are just the basic building blocks of a sane and healthy society. I wanted to create something real, shockingly real, and very human to possibly nudge a few consciouses into some human beings that are clearly lacking them. From everything that I have learned about people, though, it is a bit of a fool’s hope but then I am not denying that I am a fool.
Imagine how I felt, though, when the person who had already aimed human hand grenades in mine and other peoples’ (I later discovered) path had now declared themselves to be an expert in the area of rental housing, despite owning their own home for longer than many of their fellow renters rights campaigners have been alive and being involved in numerous enterprises that have indirectly whacked up the housing and rental prices… Can you imagine how that felt?… Hang on! Can you though?
Much of what I have described is about empathy, could Tony Blair put himself in the position of an Iraqi child as smart bombs rained down upon Baghdad? Could the ‘healthcare professional’ that described me as perfectly fit for work despite being a shut in for the decade prior imagine the toll of a year of appeals had on my mental and physical health? (I have had ptsd from that ever since). Does Iain Duncan Smith ever imagine how many deaths he directly caused and feel the fear and desperation of all those that died? Did Margaret Thatcher ever stop to consider her destruction of British industry, the deaths of soldiers for a rain sodden island in the middle of nowhere or just what would happen when the council housing disappeared? Do the people who nailed my photo to lampposts still believe that I am a ‘bad man’ because someone else told them so and I dared to question the sense of what they were doing and the damage it could cause, did they imagine how it must feel to have that much hate and those sort of threats directed at you from unnamed sources? Do the estate agents who threatened me with court action even remember my name? Would the guy who profited from my being slung out of my home of fourteen years so he could make an extra few thousand pounds even recognise me if he passed me in the street? It’s amazing the mental gymnastics that some people go through just to make what they do seem okay and the juggling that they go through to justify their continued wrong doing.
Which brings me to the situation right now. Does the person who knew me and now is blocking my path to promote my book on the housing crisis locally know that they are causing harm to me and to the whole cause of improving the housing crisis and, if so, do they care? The truth is, I haven’t a clue. To be honest, I honestly don’t know who that person truly is and I doubt that I ever did. Their actions seem entirely insane to me and completely unfathomable.
This brings me, finally, to the second part of the question… Am I a good person?
Surely this one fact must have a massive effect on who and what I see as wrong or indeed evil.
In a way, I am the last person to even judge that as I cannot separate myself fully from my actions to judge. The fact that I don’t think I am is actually a sign that I’m probably better than I think but we are getting into the realms of circular logic here. I can be ratty sometimes, I swear a lot and I am less forgiving than I’d like to be, I could be better at recycling, I didn’t go to my own mother’s funeral and I would never go on a protest march, however the last two are down to autism but I still didn’t do them and they haunt me. There are things I know upset other people that I don’t feel in the slightest bit sorry about, like not going to weddings or their social gatherings (autism again) but the ones that really upset people are the drawings… I have done some horrendous drawings of people over the years (I can’t judge as to their technical competence or ‘badness’) but, to be frank, I’ve just held up a mirror to them or the situation so those that are offended always deserve it (although , to be fair, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)… and that is about it, I think. There are a lot of people that hate me though… although I have a good idea who instigated most of that and why.
Autistic people can put people’s backs up, there is no secret to that. It’s sometimes because of the uncanny valley thing of trying to act more ‘normal’ (whatever that is) and allistic people sensing that somethings is ‘off’ or the complete honesty thing upsetting someone or the sensory processing disorder meaning that we have massively misunderstood something or have been misunderstood ourselves. We are disabled in some very unique ways that are hard to comprehend and these are some of them and it causes us to often be disliked ‘just because’.
I don’t even want to write this bit as I can’t bear vanity or virtue signalling and I make a point of keeping much of what I do very private…. Do you know what? I’ve written and deleted this paragraph of good things that I’ve done a number of times and it nauseates me. I don’t keep a score of this stuff and it would be indelicate to list who I’ve helped and why. You are going to have to trust me on this… But that is part of the point isn’t it? I have found that if you look in the papers and online sites, the shittier a human being is, the more mentions they seem to have. You will not have heard of the nicest people I know and never will as they hate publicity.
We have hit an impasse then in that how can we actually know who is good and who is bad? If the bad think they are good and the good won’t admit that they are, then how can anyone judge anyone’s actions? And my answer to that is….
Have you had a good look at the state of the world recently?
You can buy my book about the housing crisis here.
Two of the highest grossing films of all time are about something I am experiencing now… So why do I feel so out on a limb? Both James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ and Kevin Costner’s ‘Dances with wolves’ were tales of how someone realised the horrors of colonialism and made the drastic decision to side with the colonised.
It’s the bloody autism innit? I look at something and see the wrongness and out it blurts and there I am, upsetting people again. But… it was the right thing to do! Honest!
Now, as everybody else will happily point out to me, the right thing to do is very rarely the smart thing to do and it is often the polar opposite, and when you slap a chapter in your book about the housing crisis about the damage caused by an influx of very insular (mostly) Londoners, don’t be surprised when the local paper that is riddled with them will not touch you or your book with a bargepole. I could quite easily have whipped that part out and got a bit more local interest but I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself as they are a major cause of the housing crisis where I live.
I was talking to a local friend this morning who was complaining that they had been recommended on social media. What is wrong with that you might ask? Well the problem was that it was on a page dedicated to and run by these interlopers. Not all (I hasten’t to add) but most want something for nothing and are constantly complaining and throwing their weight around and many local people simply won’t deal with them anymore. Those born here watch their children struggle to rent pokey flats in the grimmest of areas while they walk past streets that are empty all week and then they have the cheek to ask for discounts… Tacky!
It comes to something when even the new renter’s union consists of many of these small scale colonists, homeowners and those linked to landlords to-boot; as far as I’m concerned that is all about as sane and wise as creating the Myra Hindley children’s playgroup and creche. How can anyone fix a problem that they are instrumental in creating? It hardly makes them able to clearly evaluate the cause of escalating rents and massive shortages when they have helped caused them. Sadly, no one listens to me though… Ho Hum.
As is painfully obvious to all but the most unhinged of people, life is not like the movies. People like myself who stand up for what is right against overwhelming odds tend to get squashed like bugs rather than rewarded with a freeze frame and a fade to black. Sadly, I’m too daft and or stubborn to act any other way.
Christopher Hoggins Artist 
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