As Homelessness Soars Number Of Empty Homes In London Hits Seven Year High

London doesn’t have a housing problem it has a rich people problem.  Despite soaring homelessness in the capital, figures recently released by the government show that the number of homes left empty in the city has risen for the first time since 2009.

There are currently 59,881 empty homes in London.  That is enough to house everybody currently living in emergency temporary accommodation in the city  – and everyone sleeping on the streets.  20,000 of these properties have been empty over two years.  These are not second homes, properties which are rented out or homes used for holidays.  They are empty, abandoned in some cases, or more often deliberately left vacant as investment opportunities.

It is this that is likely to be the reason the number of empty homes is rising in the capital but falling everywhere else in the UK.  Luxury penthouses built not for living in, just for making money out of.  These cunts are so rich they can’t even be bothered to rent out the properties they own – they just sit back and profit as house prices soar.  Or at least they did.  The party may soon be over with central London house prices now starting to fall.

This is the legacy of Boris Johnson.  A capital city remade as a grotesque monument to capital.  The real people of London forced out, or condemned to a life on the margins whilst billionaires built their own corporate Disneyland.  A sterile landscape of glass and steel now dominates the city whilst once beautifully chaotic streets are overrun with chain stores and wacky trust fund businesses selling bowls of cereal for a fucking fiver.  There is no place for human life in this city at all.  It is just a place that money lives now.

An army of security guards stalk the privatised city streets handing out fines to kids playing football or folk enjoying a quiet beer in the park.  Racist cops ruthlessly shut down working class culture wherever they find it, even banning clubs from playing music they don’t like.  Uniformed filth carrying machine guns glare at people on the public transport system.  Occassionally they shoot someone.  The message is stark and clear.  This is not our city anymore, this is a giant bank where the crooks of the world can store their wealth.  And so we must be constantly policed, always watched in case we present a threat to the pampered lifestyles of the wealthy minority.

According to charities the number of people who slept rough on the streets of London this winter rose by 15% in just one year to 2,561.  Beneath the glitzy facade poverty stalks the city. Bodies huddle in shop doorways whilst champagne glasses clink in restaurants where a meal costs more than a week’s wages.  Children go hungry in grotty hostels beneath empty shyscrapers where the flats cost millions of pounds yet no-one lives there.  This is what Boris has created.  A ghost-town in sky that has shut out the city’s light.

Quietly though, everywhere, people are organising.  Thousands of people whose homes are under threat grow more militant everyday.  Students are on rent strike across the capital.  Towards the end of the 2011 riots a mob headed towards Notting Hill and Sloane Square, smashing up designer shops and attacking restaurants.  Unlicenced and boisterous street parties are shaking the newly gentrified enclaves that once belonged to the working class.  Tenants facing eviction are barricading themselves in their homes.

Direct action, disruption and outright defiance are the weapons of choice, not petitions, or voting, or boring marches.  Everyone knows now who is too blame and where they live.  A reckoning is surely coming.  Be ready.

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Fuck The Rich. Let’s Shut Down the Ripper Museum And Start Taking Our Communities Back

There is nothing that the grasping rich won’t try and turn into money.  Not one thing that is sacred, that can be left to just be, that is too treasured, or even horrifyingly grotesque, for capitalism to plunder.

Whether it’s our schools, or hospitals, our communities or our homes, the rich are always there, on the edges, looking for a way in.   When we walk down the street we see each other – we see human beings – but the monied entrepreneur class just see livestock, to be exploited in our work and fleeced in our play.  Even our triumphs are repackaged and sold back to us, as if the struggle for the vote, or against racism, the right to strike or popular protests were concepts invented by some Oxbridge twat with a clipboard and a second class marketing degree.

So it is no surprise that the murder of working class women 100 years ago is now being turned into just one more way for the rich to plunder our history for their own enrichment.  The vile Ripper Museum, situated in Cable Street, East London, is not wanted by anyone who lives in the area and those behind the project know it.  That is why they lied in the planning application that this building would be turned into a museum championing the history of women in East London.  What they have built instead however is a blood-stained celebration of the murder of East End women, a gaudy, misogynist tourist trap where you can buy Jack the Ripper themed rape whistles or have a selfie taken with some dickhead dressed up as a Victorian serial killer.

That dickhead is likely to be Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, the creepy owner of the museum and who is unrepentent about deceiving both the council and community of Tower Hamlets to bring his woman-hating serial killer fetish to life.  Astonishingly Edgecumbe was a former head of diversity at google where he obviously did a shit job because almost eveyone in a senior position at the company is posh and white.  But diversity doesn’t mean a real commitment to equality anymore, it is just a marketing tool.  Racism, misogyny, homophobia – there’s money to be made there.  And that’s what Edgecumbe does, sitting on Diversity Advisory Panels where rich white people hand out plaudits to rich white businesses to celebrate the fact that half their cleaners are black and they’ve got one of those new transgenders working in the post room.

Meanwhile the community of East London is being both socially, and racially cleansed, to make way for these gentrifying parasites.  Genuine diversity, which the East End was famous for, is being replaced by glass and steel ghost towns as every last brick is turned into an investment opportunity for the global super rich.  Tower Hamlets desperately needs housing, but the people who live there have no say in what happens to the streets they walk down.  Even when there is some pretence of community involvement, such as in planning decisions, the rich just lie about what they intend to do and no-one holds them to account.

No-one until now anyway.  Class War have been holding boisterous protests outside the Ripper Museum with the support of local residents and feminist groups.  Their demand is simple, the Ripper Museum needs to close.  We get to decide what goes on in working class areas, not corrupt councillors or nauseating spivs like Palmer fucking Edgecunt.  Join them outside The Ripper Museum, 12 Cable Street, London E1 this Saturday 5th December at 2pm.  Please help spread the word and share the facebook page.

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The Temperature Is Rising, Let’s Show Them We Fucking Mean It

They will keep coming back for more and more if we let them. They will come for our homes, our pensions, our benefits, our health service, everything they think they can grab. Everything that working class people have won.

Don’t think having a job will save you. As the bungled attempts to cut tax credits shows, they don’t give a fuck about that anymore. If your wages are low, then tough shit, you obviously aren’t working hard enough is the new mantra from the rich. To be poor now, whether working or not, is a sin in itself and the only way for redemption is to be poorer, to teach us a lesson. They think this will make us like them – grasping venal capitalist scum, exploiting at every turn, fucking over our neighbours in a desperate scramble to hoard wealth for ourselves whilst around us bodies huddle in shop doorways. That is what they mean by being a striver. It is the morality of thieves, the worship of the worst of human nature. And it must be stopped.

None of this has happened by accident. The working class had to be broken before this capitalist coup could be enacted. This destruction of organised labour, the endless succession of petty laws, an obedient and ever ready to be violent police force, the erosion of living standards and housing, all of these were necessary to eradicate the kind of collective action of the scale that is needed to resist this attack. But the truth is that the class war is far from over. We are not broken, not by a long way. It is the pampered rich, who think their privilege is safe behind the walls we built, who are the real vulnerable ones. Their entire cosseted existence depends on us remaining compliant. That is why even the most trivial act of political disobedience or rebellion terrifies them. They are as scared of us building the level of resistance necessary as we are cynical about whether that can be achieved. But it can be done, history shows us that. And it will start in the fucking streets.

On Wednesday (4th November) students will be taking to the streets demanding free education. Thousands are expected to attend what promises to be a lively demonstration. The march will depart from Malet St, outside the former University of London Union, at 13.30pm. For more info visit the organiser’s website.

The next day (bonfire night, Thursday 5th November) will see the annual Million Mask March take place in cities across the globe with Class War promising to drag an effigy of Tory London mayor candidate Zac Goldsmith in chains down Whitehall.  This event was huge last year and begins at 18.00 in Trafalgar Square.  More details on facebook.

Finally on Saturday 7th November the Class War Women’ s Death Brigade will be back outside the vile and unwanted Ripper Museum on Cable Street, E1.  Meet at the Cable Street Mural at 2pm and help drive this creepy bunch of gentrifying wannabe psychopaths out of the East End for good.

Please help spread the word about all events.

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Ignore The Fucking Hipsters Crying Into Their Cornflakes, Long Live The Fucking #FuckParade

Rarely has there been a more open display of arrogant entitlement than the alliance of pampered hipsters and Tory scum who have lined up across the media to attack yesterday’s anti-gentrification protest in Shoreditch.  From ‘High Society Darlings’ in The Independent to the usual spittle-flecked tirades in The Telegraph, the establishment are united in their revulsion that working class people could not only organise themselves, but took a step beyond the usual stale political marches and petitions that we are supposed to use to air our grievances.

By all sensible accounts last night’s Fuck Parade – organised by Class War and named after similar anti-gentrification protests in Berlin – was a huge success.  Hundreds of people took to the streets for a party and protest that has lit up the debate about gentrifcation in London.  At one point an estate agent’s window was shattered, whilst some paint and cornflakes were thrown at the daft Cereal Killer Cafe – an emblem of the hipster invasion of East London where bowls of cereal can cost the best part of a fiver.  And it is a fucking invasion as posh flats and trust-funded small businesses spread across London like a virus, with every last brick turned into an investment opportunity.

Some of those new local business owners have suggested that to complain about this is a bit like racism – raising the ghost of Oswald Mosley to smear the protesters.  The owners of the cereal cafe have even complained that the protest was a hate crime.  Have you ever heard anything so fucking vile?  To the cosseted middle classes racism, and even fascism,  are just things to be re-appropriated for their benefit when their privilege comes under attack.  How the poor hipsters have suffered due to a bit of paint on a window and some loud music and shouting.  It’s like Nazi Germany all over again, only this time the victims are posh white people who run businesses.  They are no different to the UKIP pub bores dribbling into their pints about the global conspiracy against the straight white middle-class male.

The harsh reality is that, according to the government’s homelessness statistics, at least 259 children were made homeless in Hackney in the last quarter.  This is what gentrification does to people.  That’s 259 young lives destroyed by soaring rents and housing shortages.  And that’s just those who were classed as officially homeless and so eligible for help from the local council.  Hundreds of thousands of kids are growing up in social housing who will have nowhere to live when they are older.  A crisis is taking place in the lives of London’s poorest residents who will never share in the middle class Disneyland that is being created in the wake of social cleansing.

None of this is our fault plead the hipsters, why not blame the council.  And the council blames the property developers, who in turn, say they are just providing the homes and business spaces that people want – like the people who run the Cereal Killer Cafe.  No-one is to blame, and yet everyone’s making a buck.  Except the poor, the collateral damage in this profit driven frenzy that is destroying the city.

So fuck small businesses.  Today’s hipster entrepreneur is the Richard Branson of tomorrow – and it would have done no harm if that cunt had been nipped in the bud early.  That doesn’t mean you should fall out with your local off licence, you’ll never get anything on tick that way.  There are many businesses that we have little choice but to use and that may be run by people that give something back to the community that provides their lifestyle.  These kinds of businesses are also falling victim to gentrification.  But to pretend that the interests of business and the people who work for them are the same is horseshit.  That is why the Tory Party styles itself as the party of small business people and acts as they do.  Every current attack on the poor is being carried out not just for the benefit of the super rich, but also the gentrifiers of Shoreditch and their pop up monstrosities.  If the new business class don’t like that they could try and do something about it.  But instead they seek to profit from it.

Of course these hipsters have decided that last night was all about them.  Everything always is.  But the Fuck Parade is clearly about more than a bit of paint on a cafe’s window.  As long time East End resident Martin Lux has said, Saturday night was a continuation of the near thousand year old tradition of the London mob.  Hundreds of people joined a protest that didn’t ask for permission and took to the streets with the mixture of carnival and defiance that has defined popular protests in London.  An anti-gentrification movement with real teeth – but that is also fun to be a part of – is what the city desperately needs.  So ignore the fucking hipsters crying into their cornflakes, and long live the fucking Fuck Parade!

UPDATE:  Class War have now released a statement about the events of Saturday night.

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Fuck Sotheby’s, Fuck The Rich, Let’s Take The Class War To Their Front Doors

Walking through Mayfair you would not believe that this could be a country where the poorest are abandoned to survive on just a few pounds a day.  Mayfair screams money, and there the rich play openly, driving their sports cars, holidaying in luxury hotels and sitting outside expensive restaurants whilst a few hundred yards away people bed down in shop doorways.

Of course the people working in those restuarants and hotels do not share in this vast wealth – most are working for a minimum wage that will not even pay for the basic necessities of life.  These people do some of the hardest work in society, working long hours for fuck all, cleaning up the shit and detritus of the rich.  And after Wednesday’s budget they will be made even poorer to pay for a huge inheritence tax cut for the children of millionaires.

At Sotheby’s auction house in the heart of Mayfair, billionaires bid for scrappy pieces of art, spending more on trinkets than most families will ever earn in their entire lifetimes.  Yet the cleaners and porters who work there do not even get decent sick pay, and four of them were just sacked for complaining about it.  The rich, and the lackies like Sotheby’s that serve them, treat the poor with utter contempt, as if the only purpose of these living, breathing human beings is to generate them ever more wealth that all, ultimately, comes from the work we do.

In the past during periods of such grotesque inequality the rich lived in terror, hidden away behind locked doors, praying that their guards and servants did not slit their throats as they sleep.  Yet now they flaunt their fortunes for all to see, laughing and braying in the London sun as they boast about their property portfolios and bark orders at those they consider beneath them.  There is no indignity too great that it cannot be inflicted on the plebs, the chavs, or whatever they are fucking calling us this week.

The class war is real, it is destroying our lives and they will take everything unless we start to fight back.  There should be no comfort for millionaires whilst  children go hungry –  the rich should not be permitted to eat and sleep and enjoy their pampered lives as if everything is as it should be.  This has gone on for far too long, and it could be stopped in a heartbeat if we re-learn to act collectively on the scale that is required.

So fuck elections and get out on the streets.  Advance to fucking Mayfair, starting this Wednesday, and support the sacked cleaners who lost their jobs for daring to raise their voices.  Join Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) earlier in the day and say Balls to the Budget.  Come to the Fuck Parade in Camden on Saturday and fight back against rampant gentrification.  Wherever there is trouble run towards it, because it is time to rediscover our pride and show our strength and our rage.  There is fucking more of us than them.  Let’s start to make sure they know that.

Disabled People Against Cuts are gathering outside Downing Street at 10.30am on Wednesday July 8th, full details at: http://dpac.uk.net/2015/06/wednesday-8th-june-at-westminster-and-online-balls-to-the-budget/

The protest demanding the re-instatement of the sacked Sotheby’s workers is on the same day, meet outside the United Colours of Benetton, at Oxford Cicus from 5.30pm or head to Sotheby’s at 34-35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA, more info at: http://www.uvwunion.org.uk/upcoming-events/2015/7/8/shame-on-sothebys-reinstate-the-sothebys-4

In the meantime everyone is piling on Sotheby’s on twitter @Sothebys and their facebook page.

Class War’s anti-gentrification Fuck Parade is meeting outside Camden Tube at 7pm on Saturday 11th July, info at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1476014982689696/

If you are outside London or can’t make these protests please help by sharing, tweeting and blogging about them.  Feel free to post details of protests around the UK in the comments.

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What Do We Want? More Fucking Money. Vote Class War To Double The Dole!

Over the last couple of decades a warped consensus has emerged, shared by politicians, think tanks and even anti-poverty charities, that the very worst thing you can do for someone who is poor is give them what they need – which is more money.

The belief is that giving people money will dis-incentivise them, make them lazy, trap them in dependency to languish on benefits or discourage them from taking up all of the wonderful opportunities capitalism provides to work in a shit job on the minimum wage.  And it is this last reason that lies behind the ideology.  Bosses are worried that if people were paid decent unemployment benefits then then they would want more money for working.  Wages and working conditions have become so atrocious that they are right to be worried. If benefits were increased then wages would have to rise.

Increasing benefits would be easy.  The main unemployment benefits costs just over £4 billion a year.  The DWP spends nearly twice that on admin and salaries, with much of that money going to private companies paid to harass unemployed people by forcing them onto workfare schemes.  One report found that if the rich were actually to pay all the tax they dodge then it would raise £122 billion a year – enough to double both in and out of work benefits without a single tax rise.  Soak the rich who do bother to pay tax as well and doubling both state pensions and the dole would be a piece of piss.

It is astonishing and shameful that as figures show one million people were forced to depend on foodbanks in the last year that not one of the main political parties is calling for more money for the poor.  Only Class War, whose Westminster candidate Adam Clifford gave a fine interview on the Daily Politics show today, have promised to increase all benefits and pensions by doubling them.

If we have to live under this shit state of affairs, where the rich reduce our lives to near servitude with shit jobs, paltry benefits and soaring rents, then we should fight for every last penny we can take.  Until we are strong enough to take it all.  We want more fucking money – in wages, pensions and benefits.

Follow @ClassWar2015 on twitter and spread the word about Mayday’s Reclaim The Beats event outside the poor doors at 1 Commercial Street.

Class War are fielding seven candidates, including Lisa Mckenzie who is standing in Chingford against Iain Duncan Smith.  Visit their website for more details.

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This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Iain Duncan Smith Election Challenger Arrested Over Alleged Sticker

Lisa McKenzie, who is standing for Class War  against Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford, was arrested last night in the latest petty police attack on the group’s election campaign.

Lisa was accused of putting a small sticker on a wall two weeks previously and thrown into the back of a van, hand-cuffed and held for hours.  She has been charged with criminal damage. The arrest took place at last night’s Poor Doors demonstration, the weekly picket of the luxury tower block in Aldgate where tenants in social housing are forced to use a different door to the rich.  According to one onlooker police insisted her arrest was nothing to do with the election campaign against Iain Duncan Smith.  They must think we are fucking idiots.

When Lisa and Class War recently went on the campaign trail in Chingford they were followed by police, repeatedly harassed and threatened with arrest.  Class War candidate for Croydon South, Jon Bigger, was recently followed around the constituency by up to a dozen coppers just for handing out leaflets.

At previous Poor Doors protests police arrested high profile Class War supporter Jane Nicholl, threatening her with ludicrous arson charges after somebody allegedly burnt a small effigy of Boris Johnson.  At a later demonstration police seized a Class War banner they said had a rude word on it and arrested the person holding it.  One of Class War’s founders, Ian Bone, has also been arrested at the protests for equally trivial reasons.

Both the Poor Door’s protests and Class War’s election campaign have been boisterous, but peaceful.   The only violence has come from jumped up twats in uniform doing the bidding of the likes of Iain Duncan Smith. This is what fucking democracy looks like when working class people use their system to fight for our interests.  Petty arrests, police violence, censorship and harassment replace televised debates and election hustings.  Class War’s slogan ‘by the brick or the ballot paper’ has never seemed more apt.  The bastards will come for you whichever you choose if they don’t like what you say.

Lisa Mckenzie, who was recently described as the living embodiment of class hatred by former Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, has vowed this arrest will not silence her.  Following her release she said “if they want to shut me up they will have to kill me”.

The Poor Doors protests continue, every Thursday, 6pm, 1 Commercial Street, London E1.

Visit Class War’s website for the latest news on the campaign: http://www.classwarparty.org.uk/

Above pic from Class War’s facebook page.

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This Is Our City Not Theirs, It’s Time To Tell The Rich To Fuck Off

As glass and concrete spindles made of luxury flats climb into the clouds above London below them lives a generation of children who will never be able to afford to live here when they are grown up.

Across the capital families and communities are being fractured as rents soar beyond poverty wages and benefit caps mean eviction and forced relocation for those who fall on hard times.  In central London at night huddled bodies in sleeping bags fill the shop doorways whilst camps of homeless migrants hide beneath bridges and in tunnels after finding out the city’s streets were actually paved with shit.  Social housing estates are being slowly run down, decanted and demolished to make way for the rich and a handful of so-called affordable properties that nobody local can afford.  Gentrification forces up rents and closes down well loved local pubs and markets to be replaced by hipster twats selling over-priced cupcakes or bowls of fucking Coco Pops to each other.

The rich should not just be unwelcome in this environmnent, they should be despised.  None of this has happened by accident.  As property prices rocket out of reach every last fucking brick has become an investment opportunity.  London does not have a housing problem, some of the most expensive properties in the city are empty and unused.  London has a rich people problem.

Yet as the social and cultural heart of the capital is ripped apart, a spectre is haunting London.  A spectre of toff-hating fucking rage.  Recently up to four thousand people marched on City Hall demanding homes, whilst a breakaway groups took to the roads and occupied empty flats on the Aylesbury Estate. Abandoned properties have been occupied throughout the capital from Stratford to Mayfair.  Shadowy American property developers Westbrook Partners were chased out of their ownership of the New Era Estate after threatening to hike rents.  Local groups who face losing their homes have brought construction sites to a standstill with blockades.  Last week bailiffs, the attack dogs of the rich, were pelted with paint bombs at their glitzy annual award ceremony.   And the boisterous Poor Doors demonstrations are back after pampered property developer Taylor McWilliams declared there was nothing he could be arsed to do to end social segregation in the building his company owns.

It is little wonder that the rich want us out of their playground.  Property developers now boast in adverts that there will be no social housing tenants in their luxury new flats.  Poor doors force low income tenants to use a different entrance to their homes than the rich who live in the same buildings.  Even gardens that were promised to low income residents are now to be fenced off and made available for posh cunts only.  David Cameron has threatened a policy which will socially cleanse the poor from the entire South East of England within a week of any Tory election victory.  But we are not fucking going anywhere.

At the recent housing march it was declared that the growing movement for homes is the beginning of the end of London’s housing crisis.  Escalation is now vital on every front.  It’s time to make the rich feel unwelcome.  To let them know that if they leave their luxury buildings empty they will be occupied.  If they force us to use poor doors we will mob their buildings and spoil their dinners.  That from the trust fund Tarquins destroying local communities to the plutocrats, bankers and global super-rich buying houses to keep empty as investments, we will hunt them down and make their lives as uncomfortable as they want to make ours.  There are fucking loads more of us than them.  The rich are here by our consent.  It’s time to tell them to fuck off.

Next Thursday (19th February) the Poor Doors demo will start at 6pm sharp, 1 Commercial Street, E1 and march to the site of the stolen garden at Tower Bridge SE1.  Then on Monday 23rd February Boris Johnson will be the target as housing campaigners flock to City Hall to block his budget.  If you have kids growing up in this city or plan to grow old here then you should be there, at both if you can.  This is our London, not theirs and we need to take it back.

Please help spread the word about both events, for more info on the Poor Doors protest visit Class War’s website and join/share the facebook event page for Block the Budget.

This blog has no sources of funding so here’s a quick reminder that you can help ensure it continues by making a donation.

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It’s A Fucking Landslide – Class War Top Online Election Poll!

Class War are currently topping an online election poll with 21% of the vote raising the possibility of a twisted coalition consisting of Class War, pub landlord Al Murray and the Greens or the SNP.  The Tories are languishing at a pitiful 9%. 

Vote here, then go back to your local Wetherspoon and prepare for Government!

(poll now closed, Class War were victorious)

Lisa McKenzie will be standing for Class War in Chingford against Iain Duncan Smith, read her recent piece in The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/21/estate-working-class-problem-st-anns-nottingham

For the latest Class War election news visit their website or follow them on twitter @Classwar2015

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We Gotta Get Rid Of The Ritz!

The rich should not be allowed to dine in comfort whilst people around them go hungry.  Join Class War for a noisy and boisterous demonstration outside The Ritz hotel, this Thursday 15th January at 6pm.

http://www.classwarparty.org.uk/event/class-war-goes-ritz/

 

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