If you see a house, take it and let the law do its damnedest. (Dworkin 1988, 13) This seminar has been put together at a timely juncture to interrogate the changing landscapes of property and law within legislation, within buildings, within history, within configurations of space and time, and to highlight the importance of questioning the shaky scaffolding of…
As of 1 September 2012, under Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (“LASPOA”), it became illegal in England and Wales to squat a residential building. Despite the fact that displacing someone from a building that had obvious signs of being their home without the permission of the legal owner has been illegal since the Criminal Law Act 1977, the necessity for a duplicate law just goes to demonstrate the accelerated deification and reification of individual property rights, over the social utility and sharing of resources held within the philosophy and practice of squatting. This recent shift in media-aggravated legislative change is a definitive move further in favour of the landowner as opposed to those who have no land, and those who support the redistribution of land.
William S Burroughs (1914 – 1997), is one of the most influential, and yet much maligned writers of the Twentieth Century. He has been described by critical legal theorist Nathan Moore as, “… one of the most fundamental diagnosticians of the 20th century [in] the role of power and beyond.” As one of the central contributors of the…
Despite the attempts of Tory backbenchers to delegitimize squatting, and divide it from the issue of homelessness, the two remain inextricably linked: un-met housing needs, a supply of empty property, and squatting, go hand in hand in hand. But that’s about as far as the generalizations go; squatting is both a means and an end, and the…
This piece was originally written for and presented at the Disobedience Workshop (20 – 21 May 2011) at the School of Law, Birkbeck College. Since putting together my abstract a few months ago, there have been some alterations and additions and analogies that have influenced the writing of this piece. I have been reading, and I have to say, not…
I recently returned from a three month fellowship in the kaleidoscopic nation that is Indonesia. I undertook research with non-governmental organisation ICRAF (World Agroforestry Centre), analysing their ‘rewards’ (Payments for Environmental Services or ‘PES’) schemes for the farmers for planting trees in order to sequest carbon, and my field work was based in Paninggahan, West Sumatra with…
It seems as though a unique space within UK law is soon to be removed, or at least being discussed as so. Whilst the recent bout of occupations, and the display of revolt against the violent education cuts, reached their climax, I was away in another country. I read that the rights to squat were to be removed…
A short poem inspired by the student protests, mainly on the ‘kettling of kettling’ idea used by friends and supporters of injured protestor Alfie Meadows. They created something of a ‘Russian doll’ effect by surrounding the police at their headquarters at Scotland Yard. Also some underlying thoughts on the state’s monopoly of violence. Dolly Caught in a series of monologues, an untimely proclamation…
So what stood out at the G20 protests? What was so important about such a mass of individuals swarming in their many creeds against a system that is in seeming decay? What, some said to me, was the point of such an endeavour when the leaders of the world were trying to gather together and do something…