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 As of today, all the major housing charities in the UK, including Acorn and the Renters Reform coalition, have withdrawn their support and cooperation from the government’s bill.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.
This is a sad admission but I don’t know how to handle good news. I am to be featured in the magazine The Big Issue next week. It’s only a little piece with a bit more online but it means a lot as I’ve found it impossible to get any interest in the local press. I think it’s because the book doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to either letting agents or a certain demographic of people that like to do a bit of gentrifying here and there; so between those advertising markets, I have probably shot myself in the foot a bit… Whoopsee!
Anyway, the wonderful Big Issue had included me and it feels really good to have my hard work validated and my story to make it further than the few fans of my mad ramblings and the odd person who hates me and is trying to makes sure I’m not going to go full on Rambo (Joke!).
I like a very quiet life but sometimes a thing is worth sticking my head above the top of the trench for; hopefully it shall remain attached to my shoulders. I find the adrenaline that comes with really good news uncomfortable to cope with and the shake in my hands has scuppered my ability to either draw or do photoshop for the next book today and so I have to live with the feeling, fortunately (or not) I can still type.
One really annoying thing is due to hate mail from vindictive people masquerading as socialists in my local area, I have to make it very hard to contact me directly; it’s all very People’s Front of Judea 😔. This no contact problem means that I have had to do another round of emailing any possible news outlets. Mental note, never point out when do gooders are being hypocrites. That doesn’t go down at all well. Autism eh?
Anyway, I am going to get some fresh air and I’m hoping that will help me calm down.
You can read the online bit here and it features in the Monday 8th of April issue for sellers and stockists throughout the UK. Oh and you can buy my book here and in Bookbusters Hastings.
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.
There is a myth that Autistic people don’t feel empathy or indeed much at all. It’s actually the exact opposite, we feel far too much and then blow a fuse.
In my case, I can’t be around certain people because they make my skin crawl; I can feel their awfulness and it makes my insides feel polluted.
Here’s a little empathy test for you… I hope you will play along.
Imagine feeling terrified for a day, a whole day with no respite, you are feeling the worst threat that you have ever felt in your whole life. Have You got that? Good!
Now times that by three hundred and sixty five. You wake up terrified, you go through every second of the day under threat. You develop all sorts of illnesses and your body falls apart on you. Can you imagine that? Have you got it yet? keep trying….
Now imagine another six months of that. Go on! you’ve done so much already…
Now your mother dies!
Oh! and one your closest friends on the exact same day.
Can you imagine that? Go on! Try really really hard!
Now cope with that grief while on the same day a complete stranger is ripping your floor up and a spoilt, rich, man-child, landlord is looking at you like shit on his shoes.
Now spend six more months in noise and terror and filth and dirt… You are still with me aren’t you? You haven’t sneaked off yet? Because I can’t; there is no escape for me from this, I have to live this.
And then after all that fear, and grief, and uncertainty and degradations and pollution you finally get out.
…
…
…
Oh! No! It’s not over yet, silly!
Now imagine a spoilt millionaire is breathing down your neck for a fortune to you and pocket change to him back that they had lent you to (part) move.
And imagine that you cannot get any of the last few years’ horrors from your mind and you relive them every day and you are just waiting to lose your home again because it doesn’t feel real or safe.
Now imagine your mother had left your inheritance in the care of your sister with learning disabilities (except mum refused to believe it and never told her) and that she has frittered away tens of thousands of your money because she is so utterly clueless and that (now ex) friend is still pestering you.
Now imagine that the only way you can make sense of all this and to give it some validation is to write and illustrate about what you experienced, why it happened and what can be done to improve matters; and imagine that that action make you feel slightly less hopeless.
Now imagine that is what you did, you spend the best part of the years writing and illustrating your nightmares and eventually got something together that was your testament to the pain and grief and misery you ploughed through, so you may at least have a tangible human account of the horrors our political climate can do to us. Are you still there? Are you coping ok? because by then I was leaking like a rusty bucket.
Now imagine that someone who could never be in that position because of wealth, privilege and sheer dumb luck tried to steal all that from you for nothing more than their own silly vanity. Can you imagine the level of hurt that I must feel because they dared try and rob me of the one good thing to come from years of pain and horror?
Now imagine what could possibly be going through their head to allow them to think that is an okay thing to do? Imagine how you could square that so that you could sleep at night or ever look anyone decent in the eye ever again. Can you do that? Good! That’s really good!
When I first visited here, maybe twenty years ago, I fell in love with the place; the eccentricity, the thrown-togetherness and all the strange little details that made the place unique. I had been a shut in for the best part of ten years on a soulless 80’s housing estate in a northern town where I was constantly glared at for being me.
Hastings started to feature in my painting back then as almost a mythical land and the paintings I made were filled with the curious characters I spotted. The art would be fun and vibrant and I met some lovely people; and then austerity happened.
My first few years’ paintings here were incredibly jolly, I’d let my imagination run away with and from me at a breakneck speed. I felt pride to be a part of this town and the locals I met accepted me for who and what I was and I went native. There were nods to the tragedies brought about by the Torys but the people shined through and many of them appeared in my art.
People liked what I did much more back then, the vibrant colours, the happy faces and when I painted someone, they were genuinely happy about it… Not so much now… There was a time where my portraits hung on walls. now they are mostly viewed through the gaps in closed fingers as the anger wells up.
When the art you make is a reflection of what you see it really isn’t your fault when you are exposed to and start creating a horror-show. If you woke up this morning with a spot on your nose or those bags are exceptionally droopy, do you smash the mirror? Is it the mirror’s fault for what it reflects?
Something changed in the mid twenty-tens; it was partly the austerity kicking in as one support network after another collapsed and partly that a certain type of people were getting a stranglehold over the town. The DFL (Down From London) is less a geographical demarcation than a group mentality. It is a group of self-serving people that often wrap themselves up in the word ‘community’ as a wolf would wrap themselves up in grandma’s bloodied shawl. They hit a critical mess(sic) around 2016 and proceeded to change the area from the, slightly run down, seaside town to which the poor, the eccentric and the creative had gravitated into their own money making and attention seeking playground.
Like many autistic people, I can spot patterns in, what to others is, random chaos; it’s a relief to know that now as it helps to explain the level of prescience that I have to events that could previously be written off as me being a nutter. There are over 80,000 people that live here and I only ever saw the same few faces and names pop up and I wondered why…
There is something wrong with some people, they have a deep seated need for attention and they need to be seen as good or clever or talented; to be seen as such but it is not important if they actually are. I think social media helped, it allowed a lot of pretty talentless and definitely unpleasant people to bind together in common cause. Echo chambers, for that is what this was, only reflect the views of those inside them. if thirty people stand in a circle, looking inwards, it’s unlikely that they will see the other seventy nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy people outside of that who are looking at them in disgust.
As I said, DFL is a state of mind and there were a few willing locals who had psychologically burnt most of the other local people in the town and found some new friends to play with. It was hard to remember at what point and with what it started. It might have been when the illuminated bike rides became co-opted into ‘events’ and the sound systems grew bigger and they thought that blocking the roads and waking up all the children by riding through the Old Town at night was big and clever and impressed people. I know exactly what state they were in and I’m not saying 😉. It could have been when one vaguely successful (basically, where else’s was anyone going to go with nothing else on?) New Years Eve party turned into a franchise and a bunch of has-beens that had retired early and used the discrepancy between (then) London prices and here to clear their mortgages and pretend they were the next New York Club Kids or the crew from Blitz and, suddenly, all the monster egos came out.
I remember a conversation with one of them at the time, saying that they neither had any comprehension of poverty or any of the damage that they were doing to the town and their reply was this, “Yes, we did move down from London and buy a big house, so what? The rich have made London expensive for us so it’s only natural that we will move down here and pass that onto someone else. That’s how capitalism works!” That was said to me by someone who now volunteers with a housing pressure group…
Once the DFLs had taken over the town and firmly wedged themselves in the arts, media and all the community groups they branched out into good causes. Well… perceived good causes… They would wave banners, spray shit up shit and, for some bizarre reason, everything had a choir for a while.
This is where my disgust fully sets in as many of the problems they claimed to be fixing were exacerbated by them in the first place.. If you spend years buying up the houses and specing them out for Londoners with the fancy kitchens and grey London paint jobs and you encourage your greedy mates down to buy everywhere that would have been bought by first time buyers and rent it back to them at a premium, if you gentrify the area and get funding money to pay yourself to tart up all the brownfield sites and put little community gardens everywhere that only you go to, then don’t be surprised when the house prices sore and the locals are priced out. This wasn’t helped by all those with chums in the London media rubbing their hands in glee as they came down for a weekend and went back with glowing reviews because all they saw was what their DFL friends chose to show them; not the drugs (well only the sort they like) not the poverty and hardship, just a narrow spectrum of exactly what they left in London and we got the name “Shoreditch on Sea”… Lucky us!
As things got grimmer the virtue signalling became more grotesque, public school ‘socialists’ not explaining how their massive house was paid for by hiring their London pad out to a chum’s film crew for three seasons of a comedy show. The one that spent their time not protesting working as a landing strip for yet more DFLs and funnelling them into all the cushy projects in return for her own ancillary services. The town grew more and more choked with nice ‘London types’ tapping away at their laptops in every cafe with wi-fi discussing funding, grants and social funds and the best way to extract money from them.
The projects got more and more grandiose, a festival for this, an event for that and pretty soon the town was a cut price Disneyland where all the locals were merely ‘colour’ and just unpaid bit-part actors sent to starve in their garrets now that the big wigs have moved to town. (but only as their weekend home of course)
I saw all this and I heard even more, like the people who let a child choke to death on sick and then did much worse than nothing, someone ‘helping’ the homeless that got the council to pay their mortgage with a very interesting little wheeze, I saw a wannabe working class hero let their partner struggle while they puffed themselves up in public. I saw the most damaged and depraved exploiting the most vulnerable. I saw greed and fraud and cruelty and infidelity and every single one of the seven deadly sins writ large…
As I said, I am a camera… my lens is wide open, I documented it; and then a lot of people got upset. They got upset because they recognised what they saw and did not like it; because they saw what I saw staring at them in the mirror first thing in those few picoseconds before the shutters go down and they start to believe their own lies again. Of course it didn’t help that someone lied about me a lot to cover up their seedy behaviour and they got their flying monkey chums to put the word out on me too. That’s the thing, while honesty is supposed to be a virtue, no one really wants to hear the truth.
Suffice to say, my art no longer sells that well. It rarely flatters and it doesn’t lie. And that’s about it for today.
I talk more about gentrification and the housing crisis in my book Roof-Less, available here.
I was shocked to discover after years of housing trauma and terror that I’ve been counterfeited as well.
It wasn’t enough to get ptsd, breathing problems, see my heart problems get worse, have autistic skill regression and to have constant nightmares about no longer having a roof over my head but now I’ve got a snide, Sunday market, knock off, stealing my thunder and they can distract themselves from themselves and bathe in the warm glow of another bunch of idealistic kids and the odd (emphasis on odd) desperate adult… Who knows, they may even pull again.
I had a trip down mammary lane yesterday. No that wasn’t a spelling mistake, I was indeed looking at a bunch of tits. All waving their anti- austerity flags. Holding up their placards… making backups of evidence for posterity… It was fascinating, the sheer amount of effort, all the meetings, all that furious spraying and stencilling. I’m trying to remember back to 2017. Did austerity end? Hmmmm! Don’t think so. It’s a such a shame, all those meetings all that noise, all the pacing around behind daft buggers prattling on about nothing and looking all serious. and then… nothing.
Well, someone got their leg over, someone got all huffy and complained and a big feud kicked off, I guess that’s something.
I wonder, do people like that meet up and talk about the good old days? “Do you remember when we failed to bring the government down?” “Which time? There were so many!” Is there a revolutionaries reunited site? Missed opportunity there…
Oh! There was one thing to make it all worthwhile. A screenshot of a buy-to-let landlord holding up a sign saying “Homes for all!” Oh how we laugh! Well, I do anyway. I’ve had years of mileage out of that piece of comedy gold.
I wonder, when someone does something like that, does something click? Does a little warning bell start ringing? Whoop whoop! Irony alert! Like when someone pulls a classic Shure SM58 vocal mic off the stand and suddenly remembers about photoshop…
And then…. And then….
Nothing!
Suddenly everyone’s driving to the station, parking up and getting on a train and going one stop to look like they’ve gone to a funeral for fossil fuel while being all ecological on public transport to save the planet (as Britain’s poor just weren’t enough)…. Well, that and it was another leg over opportunity.
Was environmentalism suddenly trendy? I guess it must be. Same people, same stencils, different logo. Out with that tired old austerity virtue signalling and in with rebelling against extinction; the new, improved, virtue signalling V.1.2… Or course, it didn’t stop the short hall flights…. Lots of mini breaks… but it’s the thought that counts isn’t it? Or more the perception.
Of course! I must have looked totally old hat by then. What with my old fashioned, so last year, PIP appeal and another year of being miraculously cured by Atos. I must have seemed so behind the times selling off stuff my father bought me on eBay to pay my rent when I could have been waggling my placard before hopping on a plane for a holiday in Europe. Sooooooo uncool Chris, soooooooooo uncool!
I don’t remember anyone else suffering much with the austerity though. They all got to go on holidays and dates and days trips and dinners out and booze…. Lots of booze…and all that stuff that does terrible things to your teeth…. What was it? Oh yes sweeties! That’s what it was! Brush your teeth kids!
I don’t remember going on many dates…. Well, except that one that was 20 years younger…. Not than me though… by… who was it? Silly me ! I forgot! That was interesting though, where they lived. Just across the road from… Oh my memory is really going; something about the police constantly turning up and about another neighbour dying in agony with a brain tumour while the spoiled brat next door was just incapable of shutting up…
But just as I was thinking I was really uncool; I was the velvet loon pants and gold lame boob tube of the misery stakes and I pulled a blinder and got myself thrown out in the most dramatic and spectacular fashion and there I am, I’m up on top being super cool again. It was like the ’66 cup final of victimhood. Chris tops out the disappearing rainforest by getting his home sold because the landlady couldn’t be arsed anymore. Yay me! Go team Chris! Victimhood win! Erm, yay?
Of course, it doesn’t last for long and everyone is dropping that, oh so last week, environmental nonsense and getting themselves a rental, a Rigsby landlord and their very own section 21 and it’s, elbows out, “Out of the way Chris! We’re back and better than ever!
I can imagine the conversations, “Oh! Well, you all look very enthusiastic. You’ve got your banners? Good? Stencils?” looks down, “Oh yes! very good! Face mask? Dark glasses? Those spray paint cans… That paint is non toxic? The cans recyclable? Oh! Silly me! Of course! Environmentalism was last year wasn’t it?”
“Right! Here are your new posters and banners and the T shirts… Yes, I know, red doesn’t suit many people… maybe a bit of powder so it doesn’t reflect on your face so badly? NOOOO! not that powder! Okay, later, in private.”
“Oh! by the way, is there anyone we should avoid? Him? He looks harmless, he’s even made that book about being made homeless! Are you sure? That could be a real asset! Oh! He tells the truth does he? We can’t be having that! And he has his own mind? Yikes! And he doesn’t follow group think? Oh Dear! Can’t have that! And he points out when people are massive hypocrites… Oh, does he? You are crying rather a lot… Is this normal? Are you okay? Would you like a tissue?”
But for how long? Will the Housing Crisis as a cause celebre keep on trucking? Or will it all be dropped for something else? Maybe something a little less energetic next time? After all, isn’t everyone looking old now… I’m wonder why?
And in all that time , from austerity, to the environment to housing… I wonder if anyone is looking at my autism and thinking, “Ooh yeah! I’m gonna have me some of that sweet neurodivergent action. Whack it on a banner, get myself a puzzle piece sprayed on something, Barge their way into Chris Packham’s house for a selfie and sign Susan Boyle up for the latest neurodiverse choir. Maybe this one will get us an OBE or two; and we will definitely get a bit of funding money out of it too.
That’s what it all boils down to, to be honest; money. Not one of these people has anything close to a proper job where you work long hours and have genuine responsibilities. Why do that when you can spout crap and drink coffee on expenses?
And look at all they’ve achieved Just look! Well, erm… oh! Let’s forget about that shall we?
Talking of achievements, some of us actually have something useful to show for the last decade. You can buy my books here.
Christopher Hoggins Artist 
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