‘Down and Out in Paris ..,and Rochdale!'

by Andrew Wastling

'The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.' 
Henry David Thoreau , On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849  

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INSTEAD of being a progressive driver of positive social change Rochdale council still seems intent on moving our civil liberties back almost four hundred years to the time when beggars or those without visible means were forcibly taken to the Parish boundary and unceremoniously thrown over it onto the mercy of the neighbouring Parish for poor relief giving to the rise to the expression ‘From Hell, Hull and Halifax, may the Good Lord deliver us!'
These words form part of the infamous Thieves’ Litany, uttered in Mediaeval Yorkshire as a leave-taking ‘prayer’ between two thieves as they parted. Hell was to be feared, of course, as was Hull Gaol with its evil reputation. Halifax was one of those towns granted the right to a ‘gibbet’, (still visible at the end of Gibbet Street , in Halifax to this day ), a particular savage form of early guillotine, which  was notorious for its quick use against suspected villains. In the seventh century paupers were sometimes branded on the forehead with a letter 'V' for vagrant. 
Whilst in  the 1930's, local Socialist writer Jack Hilton was truncheoned into near temporary paralysis at the Town Hall Poor Relief Assizes simply for speaking out in support of the poor & needy of Rochdale in the Great Depression. In the preceding eighty odd years we have thankfully made considerable progress.  Or at least some of us have.

Hilton knew he was a link in a long chain going back to the Middle Ages and beyond of those who'd chronicled the lived experience of the poor and marginalised in this country when he described the treatment of vagrants in the late 1500's in Caliban Shrieks ,written 1935 ,he vividly described the medieval lived experience the poor:

'Vagabonds were sentenced to be branded, five to be hanged , and eight set to service .  Service was unvarnished slavery .And it was from the stress of such times that humanity set up it's workhouses. We still have them with us.'

We also have first hand descriptive evidence by Jack Hilton of the scene in the Rochdale  Means tests for Public Assistance  in the middle 1930's when he noted brutality to the poor remained , just in a different form:

'What sort of civilised action in such callousness. When you take away the last straw off the poor blighter, it's a punishment that eats into his bone ? '

What sort of 'civilised actions' indeed comrade?

Proving that history does indeed have an uncanny knack of repeating itself we read that in the twenty first century Rochdale Council seems to be again intent on a course of action that insure that far from being feared that they are widely ridiculed & locally despised.
Human rights are human rights.  We can not decide that some human rights are more important than others or cherry pick those we wish to preserve & those we wish to ignore. For that way lies Animal Farms proclamation by the pigs and the rank hypocrisy of governments that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite : ' All animals are equal but some are more equal than others,' is the well known political phrase.
Or perhaps in Rochdale Councils  case : 'some human rights abuses less important than other human rights abuses' ?
Maybe our council could take us further backwards  still and bring back the use of St. Chads stocks , reintroduce the 'rack', public floggings with the birch ,put the building of a shiny new privately run Rochdale Workhouse up for tender to the highest bidder and while they are at it have the poor of our Borough sew a letter 'P' for Pauper on their clothing so they can be easily identified for ridicule by their fellow citizens & aid their imminent arrest by the Goon Squads of the State apparatus ?
As to imposing one thousand pound fines for begging just refer R v Ealing Justices ex p Cloves (CO/16/10/89) where the Court said:
'If the defendant cannot pay the fine within a reasonable time, it is an indication that the fine is too high.'
Owing money is of itself not a criminal act.'
Amongst the widely ridiculed ' swearing ban' we also have the deeply undemocratic : 'Unauthorised distribution of printed material/leaflets' - having to get each and every leaflet authorised before it's handed out smacks of the Stasi, the Police State & Orwell's Thought Police. 
Who exactly decides what is to  be authorised and approved and what passes or fails to pass the official State sanctioned Censor I wonder ?
In the Manifesto Clubs booklet, 'Leafleting: A Liberty Lost?',  it is argued that:  '27% of councils now restrict public leafleting.'
Prompting their call for 'a review of local authorities’ no-tolerance policies, and for a more liberal regime that recognises leafleting as part of a free and vibrant civic life.'

Equally in Areopagitica, published in 1644, John Milton argued that licensing laws were a dead hand on the search for understanding, with every creation passing under the licenser’s stamp and pen before  it could enter into the world. The criticisms of fellow citizens were a surer test of truth than friars or crown agents, he argued:
‘Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be  monopolised and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.’
The pressure of liberal opinion won the day, and the licensing of printing was finally ended in 1695, a century or more before many continental states.
'Why are beggars despised?' , asked George Orwell in 'Down and Out in Paris and London' , 1933 .
'A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.'
In Austerity Britain where the Social Market Foundation (SMF) has just revealed the rich are 64% richer than before the recession, while the poor are 57% poorer .We have witnessed , and sometimes witness daily , since 2010 a year on increase in rough sleepers, a 60% rise in families living in temporary accommodation with 67% of children living in poverty from working families.  It should come as no surprise that at the same time the poor should be more visible on our streets .  Their cardboard pedestals a stark & constant reminder of the abject failure of neo-liberalism for many.  Equally we should not be surprised that those in power wish to demonise & scapegoat these inconvenient reminders that the glitzy consumerist utopia does not work for all.  Or even better sweep them out of sight and out of mind entirely.
Gentrification like urban poverty is nothing new. Just ask the sans-culottes driven out of their Paris quartiers in the 1860's by Barron Haussman in the 1860's , any barrios , favela , or slum dog millionaire dweller from Dickens to Dakar .Or simply ask any of the  29 mothers and expectant mothers from the E15 Campaign who received eviction notices and were told they would have to get out because the council’s funding stream to the mother and baby unit suddenly stopped by Newham Council due to Austerity and are now resisting gentrification across London.
Equally as Mike Davis points out in his excellent 'Planet of the Slums' , the 'brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalisation' have spawned :
'A proletariat without factories, workshops , and work, and without bosses, in the middle of the odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.'
Simultaneously we stand both despairingly distant from yet tantalisingly close to the post industrialism of Pyotr Kropotkin's 'Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow'.  It does not require much investigation to see that:  
'Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.'   Especially when we consider that  a massive £250 million pounds regeneration programme for Rochdale Town Centre it is that many of us who comprise the 'precariat' still remain 'drowning in survival' and feel alienated to and disenfranchised from the local democratic decision making process that seeks to map out our sparkling futures in which we are no longer citizens but consumers.  Mere spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd many steps removed from a dysfunctional local 'democratic process' that is neither transparent , inclusive or truly represents or involves the majority of local residents at all.
A neurotic  political climate in which we read dumfounded that a legitimate question about , 'the Labour Group wanting  to adopt a policy promoted by the local Green Party to create an additional 100 allotments in Rochdale.' Was refused on the dubious grounds that the question , 'How many allotments have been created over the 12 months since then?', was deemed too 'politically motivated' by our Big Brother Council ?
Rather than seeing 'reds under the flower beds', conspiracies and shady plots in legitimate questions about innocuous allotments our council should have a thumb through Peter Hall and Colin Ward 'Sociable Cities' since 'the birthplace of cooperation' seems far from sociable at the moment with it's  proposed a Public Space Protection Order.  They should take a lesson from Colin Ward when he pointed out that : 
'The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.'

We can not either divorce the issue of urban poverty from the question of private property & public space.  Attempts to marginalise demonise the poor go back to 1824 and further still to medieval times, with attempts to criminalise the urban poor at the height of the industrial revolution.  During this time, land privatisation was being rolled out on a mass scale, and hundreds of thousands of people who lacked the means to purchase property were displaced from their homes and the land some of them had lived on for generations.  The Enclosure Acts equally played their part:

'The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.'

Or my preferred version of this 17th century protest rhyme :

'The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.'

These fundamental issues of land ownership & English liberty that can be traced back to the Putney Debates, & The Levellers when Cromwell's common soldiers took on their generals to argue for greater democracy and provided a platform for 'common people' to make their voices heard. These debates, forced by the Levellers paved the way for many of the civil liberties we rightly cherish and value today.

Fundamental to the birth of English liberty then  was the realisation by Colonel Rainsborough, (the highest ranking officer to support the ordinary solders) that:
“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” 

That was in Autumn 1647.  We're of course mindful that in 1649 Cromwell sent his mounted 'iron-sides'  in to brutally supress Winstanley's nascent communistic Digger Community at St. Georges Hill. Reminding us if we need one that where there are the seeds of liberty & dreams of utopia then we will find those willing to scythe such hard won liberty's & trample shared visions of a fairer society and a Better World into the dust simply to impose their own personal dystopia. In the future warns Orwell :   

'There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the Party. But always there will be the intoxication of power.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.  The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen.  It depends on you.'

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