(Image: “yuppy drawing” by Laura Oldfield Ford.)
UPDATE 15/6. Today Hackney Council backed down and announced they are putting the whole “Public Space Protection Order” scheme on hold. There will still be a gathering outside the Town Hall, which the organisers describe as “a celebration of the values we want Hackney to be built upon”. (Whatever those might be.)
Hackney Council are trying to clear homeless people from the streets of the North London borough with an intensive campaign of harassment. The centrepiece is a new plan to criminalise and impose fines on people begging or “loitering”: the “Public Space Protection Order“. (The Council has now backed down on plans to use the fines against anyone merely sleeping rough, but is still going ahead with most of the package of powers.)
On Monday 22 June the Council is meeting to vote through its petty fascist assault. A demo has been called outside the Town Hall (Mare Street, London E8 1EA) at 5PM (facebook page here). It is called by some anti-gentrification groups active in the area, such as Hackney Renters (aka Digs) and the new “Reclaim Hackney” campaign. At least a couple of thousand people are expected.
Maybe this event could be the start of bringing together all sorts of people who are sick to the teeth with the shit taking place in London’s “trendiest” borough.
Not many years ago Hackney was known as a rough inner London borough with high poverty and a radical history. In just a decade or two its image has completely transformed, becoming the showcase of the new shiny hipster-yuppy paradise, a sterile land of vacuous arty idiots.
But of course the black, working class, migrant and dispossessed people of Hackney are still there too. Scratch just beneath the surface and the bitter tensions of race and class are very much alive. As we saw in 2011, where Hackney caught on fire in some of the most intense street fighting against the hated Met police.
Hackney is still alive, and Hackney is angry. May this get big and bold.