On Wednesday June 25th the Redbridge squatters repulsed the mailed fist which usually so carefully hidden behind the British bureaucracy's armoury of sweet words and vague appeals to reason, calm and economic necessity. Bad mark Redbridge Council! You have not received sufficient training in the all important task of fooling the people with your heart-burning 'concer" for their well-being.
Squatterst Shades of the great coo. The in 1946; and in beloved Redbridge too. calm councillors blew their cool and called in Quartermain instead. The actual fight was covered by the press and readers will know about it. Yet even at that early stage, some Evening Standard hack, scenting popular support for the squatters and the families, tried head with SOme obnoxious sophistry. is society to allow such goings on?... a bailiff's job is not a pleasant one and a street battle is not an endearing sight... of course we have every sympathy with homeless families but if we allow squatters to take the law into their own hands supposedly in the families' interests don't we open the door to (you guessed it) Anarchy and public disorder? started the fire in Woodlands Road. This is not The hedged about which side surprising as they also failed to mention how the council had ordered that any vacant council nouse ne made virtually uninhabitable by ripping up the floor boards and stair-case and off water, gas and electricity. (The ballitts merely smashed the windows and started a fire). Many local rate-payers agree with one of them who wrote to the District Auditor "I cannot believe that this deliberate vandalism is in the interests of the ratepayers or that the council is legally empowered to use the rates for such purposes... when they have not yet held the public enquiry." Other local people don't cushion their views in such verbal and legal niceties.
And what of those Anarchists and other subversive politics out to destroy society, those social hyenas feeding off the hard work of the ordinary men and women of this stricken country (etc.)? They were up to their usual destructive tricks again. They unboarded the windows and relaid the floor-boards. They undid all the hard work of the Council workmen by reconnecting water, gas and electricity to neighbours houses with the latters' consent.
At first, after Quartermain's humiliation, most of the Council were seized with fury. Town Clerk, Mr. Kenneth Nicholls was at least completely candid about the Council's role, *We intend to get rid of these people as soon as we can but the legal processes have been proved to be too slow, so it has been necessary to ignore them. The bailiffs have been very brave and honourable men, and I am proud of them."
Despite Nicholls' statement that cannot make ourselves responsible for the squatters" the council must have thought otherwise and laid down Saturday, July 6 as a categorical deadline for them to be out. They threatened water-cannon and gas grenades as the alternative.
The squatters continued with their fortifications especially as it was rumoured the council was engaging a notorious firm of hired thugs from the Midlands. And it is only at this moment, after employing violence and abuse and threatening much more of both, it is only now, two days before their arbitrary deadline that the council hotheads begin their conciliadrive - and expected the squatters and the ies to swallow it! They announced that had authorised the Borough Engineer to • look at empty council property to see if f it could be used to house people on the waiting list (4,000). But they hopelessly because while this was workmen were busy severing supply to these very same the nerve to say they 0502112 CUT OTT!
Meeting with Squatters and the Left The British Left has almost, without exception, refused any organisational support to the Ilford squatters. The L.S.E. sent money belatedly but not men; some I.S. comrades have spent nights in Woodlands Road of their own accord while their paper Socialist Worker has only carried one straight news report. The same can be said of the Communist Party which claims Redbridge as its strongest base in the country with some 2,000 members - not a murmur so far. The S.L.L. nothing; Hornsey, no one; Freedom Press, very late on the scene.
Against these, only the non-sectarian organisations Agitprop, Poster Workshop, the Tenants' Action Committee and the Bread and Puppet Theatre came in solidarity and stayed to help. The squatters are pissed off. Not that they want to be taken over by an organisation. Amongst their ranks almost every political group on the left is represented and the odd committed Methodist and anarcho-liberal as. well. If they were to raise their theoretical differences to the level of dogma and were to cling to them closer than to the solidarity gained through their collective action as squatters, then the seven occupied houses would have been empty long ago and with no help from Quartermain either.
Instead, there is no flag above the houses, either a red one or a red and black one. Their front is broad but at the moment it's solid too. And they have much sympathy from local people some of whom urge them to put the flag up. But that, as one squatter remarked is not the point, "It's when they fly the flag that things can really start happening.
And how is that situation to be brought about? Redbridge there is classical situation in miniature of isolated self-defence. But this self-defence is doomed unless it can be expanded. With 63 empty houses in Redbridge and none of them scheduled to house a family ever, there is obvious scope for expansion. But that needs militants, ten to house the squatters say. That is not all. They need to leaflet the borough ceaselessly and how can they do it when they must remain on the alert or any attack? So again they need people It is unbelievable. Most of the Left is prepared, and rightly so, to give full support to the Vietnamese N.L.F., the Palestinian guerillas. Frelimo and other African freedom fighters. to difficult, but what we tell each other everyd we are trying to do, is to intensify the strug here.
It is even more ironic then that groups who have worked hard on the G Tenants Strike (for instance) support from the squatters. Ron Bai comrades have, through their tenacity, produced a situation confrontation. Yet thousands who ca Mao's dictum about the spark and fire fail to realise that the spark created. What is needed now is to fan it. to do the fanning to blow the spark flame and to set that flame direction? Are we to let another spark because from our particular point of view wrong flint sparked it.
John Weal