memespring

The residents of London’s oldest squat, St Agnes Place, have been evicted by Lambeth Council. The Victorian street is to be demolished and replaced by a magnolia-walls-n-laminate-flooring style development of ‘affordable housing’. Its unclear how many of the former residents are to be rehoused, and how long the housing will remain affordable for (probably one generation of ownership).

The motivation for this seems to be an attempt to balance the council’s books after a couple of rather embarrassing incidents. the land has been flogged off to London & Quadrant for 16 million quid. This was done under the cover of a claim that the squatters owed the council the equivalent of £4 million in rent.

Now you can argue the toss over rights and wrongs of squatting in general, but in reality it is a complex issue, and any one example has to be considered in the wider social context.

At one extreme you have an issue, like the one that recently came to the attention of the European Courts, of a man who was using a squatted field to graze his horse (the company who owned the land won it back). Fair enough, no real harm done.  At the other end you have a fully fledged and long established community. St Agnes seems to live at this end of the continuum.

But  not in the eyes of the council apparently, and especially not in those of the Lib Dem Councillor  who holds the housing brief, Keith Fitchett, who seems intent on taking a very base approach to the whole thing.

I didn’t really have much of an opinion of the matter until I heard this guy speak on Radio 5, but he comes over as a monumental wanker, calling the residents of St Agnes parasites and pretty much claiming they are responsible all Lambeth’s housing wows.

It also turns out he has a bit of a history of flogging things off and then trying to buy them up himself (not illegal, but not the most moral thing for someone in his position to do). When his Labour counterpart Steve Reed  quizzed him on this, he responded by dragging up an issue of a schoolgirl who died on a school trip whilst Cllr Reed was in possession of the education brief. The girls parents must have been well chuffed for that to be dredged up again!

So all in all not a great chap, and not much of a step forward for community building in Lambeth. It seems it is Cllr Fitchett who is the parasite. Even Google agrees!