E-Petition, Meetings and Demos against Hackney Council’s Criminalisation of Rough Sleepers

I got this request to sign a petition on Change.org yesterday from Zahira Patel in Bromley. She writes to protest against the new police powers Hackney Council is proposing to give to their police so that they can fine and prosecute rough sleepers in the borough. She states

Hackney Council’s new “Public Space Protection Orders” will give police and council officers the power to ban “anti-social” activities such as sleeping rough or begging. Those who breach an order could be issued with a £100 fixed penalty notice or a fine of £1,000.

As homeless charities have pointed out, this will criminalise the homeless who are already vulnerable. It is absurd to impose a fine of £1,000 on somebody who is already homeless and struggling. People should not be punished for the “crime” of not having a roof over their head – there is nothing inherently “anti social” or criminal about rough sleeping. Criminalising rough sleeping privileges the appearance of Hackney and the convenience of customers over the damage caused to the vulnerable and homeless.

Note that Kay Zell Huxley, a duty manager at a pub in the area was reported to have admitted that the “vagrants hanging around” do “respect the businesses and the pubs and are generally well behaved.” It is completely unjustifiable to criminalise these people simply because they “may be intimidating for people outside.” We should not privilege the convenience and desire of customers to have a good night out without having to see any homeless people over the lives and rights of those who are homeless and vulnerable.

We already know that homeless people are amongst the most vulnerable in our society and are already victims of exceptionally high levels of violence, crime and victimisation which is often committed by the general public and largely goes unreported. Researchers at the London School of Economics confirmed this in a study commissioned by Crisis as far back as 2004 and the rate of homelessness has only increased since then. We should not allow measures which will make the lives of those with nowhere else to go even harder than they already are.

We have seen public pressure stop similar measures when they were proposed by Oxford City Council. Let’s make sure we also stop this in Hackney and everywhere else it is proposed – we must force councils and policy makers to deal with the lack of affordable housing and rising levels of homelessness in London as a whole, rather than allow them to get away with shifting the “problem” into another borough.

Please take a moment to sign this petition. Let’s make sure that Hackney Council doesn’t make rough sleeping harder than it already is!

The petition can be found at https://www.change.org/p/hackney-council-stop-criminalising-hackney-s-rough-sleepers?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=320853&alert_id=ZxcmqaXGXS_By7w7G1xVoDY42RgG6ngIOusxjs8nXPXPHSTeSF%2By1s%3D

Tonight I got this update, reporting that they were holding a public meeting against these laws and were planning demonstrations for the 22nd of this month. It’s again from the organiser, Zahira Patel. She writes

Everyone has done an incredible job of spreading this petition. We now have over 70,000 signatures and there is lots of activity being planned!

If you are free and near Hackney tonight, you may want to attend a public meeting to plan a direct action in response to the Council’s PSPOs. It will be held tonight at 7pm, Halkevi Centre, Dalston Lane.

Hackney Renters are also organising a demonstration on Monday 22nd June, 6PM, outside Hackney Town Hall, Mare Street, E8 1EA London, United Kingdom.
Please see the events page here- https://www.facebook.com/events/1403275666667416/ and attend if you can!
You can follow Hackney Renters on Twitter by following @Hackney_renters for further updates about this.

There has also been a lot of media attention on this, with stories being featured by The Independent, The Guardian, The Huffington Post and others. Singer Ellie Goulding has also criticised the Council’s PSPOs which will hopefully raise even more public attention.

Here are a few of the articles which have been published:
– http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/thousands-sign-petition-calling-on-london-borough-of-hackney-to-stop-criminalising-homeless-people-10295269.html
– http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/04/hackney-homeless-to-be-fined-london_n_7508716.html
– http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/04/ellie-goulding-challenges-british-councils-treatment-homeless-hackney-pspo
– http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jun/03/councils-help-rough-sleepers-not-fine-them-hackney

You can follow me on Twitter using @ZahiraPatel if you would like to be kept updated on further media stories on the PSPO.

I will be in touch soon over the next few weeks about how we can deliver this petition or arrange a meeting with the Council if possible. So far we have done an incredible job of building public awareness of this issue – now let’s use our collective 70,000-strong voice to persuade Hackney Council to remove rough sleeping from its PSPOs! Please keep writing to, tweeting or contacting the Council and urge them to follow Oxford City Council’s decision to leave out rough sleeping from its PSPO.

Thank you once again for all your help and I hope many of you will be able to attend the demonstration.

This is chilling, and is definitely one for Johnny Void, who is particularly interested in homelessness and the authorities’ policy of social cleansing – forcing the poor and working class out of London, in order to make it nice and attractive for the middle class and super-rich.

It also shows how reactionary the Tories are. Under Thatcher, they were determined to drag us back, kicking and screaming, into the golden age of cut-throat capitalism, the 19th century. Now they’re trying to drag us even further back to the Sixteenth Century. This was a time when the nascent industrial economy first suffered a serious recession. Thousands lost their jobs and their homes, and were forced to take to the road to look for work. This frightened the authorities, who saw ‘masterless men’ – those without a craft employer or manorial lord, as a threat to public order. Local authorities also did not wish to see their areas burdened with supporting the poor from outside. They reacted by passing a series of legislation providing for vagrants to whipped and sent on their way. The laws against vagrancy in Halifax and Hull were so severe, that they became immortalised in a ‘beggar’s prayer’

‘From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us.’

This is the modern version of that legislation. They can’t whip the poor souls, so they’re reduced to fining them instead. Which is particularly ridiculous, considering that if they had any money, they wouldn’t be on the streets in the first place.

I can, however, see this situation changing. A couple of decades ago you could hear the more extreme Tories talk approvingly about the birch in the Isle of Man. The island still retained this medieval corporal punishment, in which criminals were caned by the local police. There’s still nostalgia amongst some of the older generation for caning in schools, despite the horror stories you can hear from some of them about the abuse and violence meted out by sadistic teachers. Amongst tales of caning, my father told me how one of the teachers at his old school once threw one poor child out the window when he couldn’t answer a question.

I’ve got a feeling that some of the pressure against caning, and the birch, comes from international human rights legislation. This will go if the Tories succeed in getting rid of it. Then they’ll be nothing – or at least, very little – preventing the Tories from reintroducing the cane and the birch. And they can exercise their full, atavistic hatred of the poorest in society by having them flogged for daring to appear in public.

Kipper Bill Etheridge Wants Return of Caning in Schools

This is another meme from the Hope Not Hate Facebook page, The Real UKIP, I found over at the SlatUKIP site.

UKIP’s candidate for the West Midlands, Bill Etheridge, amongst his other bizarre and reactionary views, wishes to see the return of corporal punishment in schools.

He isn’t the only one. A lot of people of a certain age get misty-eyed and nostalgic for the old days of corporal punishment. ‘I got the cane’, they say, ‘and it never did me any harm.’ In their view, only the threat of corporal punishment will solve the problem of the lack of discipline, disruptive and even violent behaviour in schools.

This is a real problem, and you can hear some horrifying stories of teachers that have been physically attacked, sometimes suffering serious injury, by aggressive and violent pupils. There have even been notorious cases where a teacher has been murdered by one of their pupils.

To add insult to injury, teachers are further demoralised by the lack of support given by their headmasters and politicians. One teacher, who wrote about his experiences spending a year as a supply teacher in some of the poorest performing schools, described how demoralising it was, when, after complaining about a violent or aggressive pupil, the headmaster called them into examine the situation. Rather than disciplining the pupil, the head teacher simply took the approach that the teacher must some how have been also wrong.

And when the authorities have been asked how teachers are supposed to deal with disruptive pupils when the only sanctions they have against them are suspension and expulsion, their response has simply been to say something on the lines of ‘Be better teachers.’

This is simply not good enough.

Corporal punishment, however, probably isn’t the answer. If you also talk to member of the older generation, you can also hear some grim stories about what it was like at school in the mid-twentieth century, when teachers had the power to strike and beat their charges. My father went to one of the better schools in Somerset, and he describes some of the teaching staff there as violent sadists. Apart from caning and blows for even the most minor infraction, he also describes how one teacher, exasperated by one pupil’s lack of understanding in the French class, threw the lad out of a window.

The great Irish comedian, Dave Allen, was an atheist, who was very critical at times of the Roman Catholic church. He once explained his dislike of the Church came from his experience of the extremely strict discipline he’d endured as a pupil at one of the Church’s schools in Ireland. Hence remarks like, ‘The nuns – God’s stormtroopers.’

Other TV personalities have had the same experience. Terry Wogan, one of Britain’s favourite broadcasters, was on cable/ satellite TV this week in a half-hour programme about his home country. He was touring the land of Ireland, from Eire to Ulster, in a taxi, taking in Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Londonderry/Derry, and Belfast. In one episode, he returned to his old school, meeting up with his old school friends, and chewing the fat about their experiences. Like Dave Allen, he described how the school, in the person of Fr. McGlochglan, tried to put the fear of God into their students. He stated that, rather than strengthening his faith, it left him with no great love for the Church and its teachings. Later, talking to a priest, who he used to have on his radio show in Ireland, El Tel said he was an atheist.

I’ve heard much the same from members of my own family. One of my uncles was lapsed Roman Catholic. Although technically a member of the Church, he never practised because he had been put off by the viciousness of the monks, who taught him at school.

And it wasn’t just the Roman Catholic church. One of my friends had the dubious benefit of being privately educated. I can remember being surprised by his views on corporal punishment when I was talking about the issue one day at College. My friend is certainly no rebellious firebrand by any stretch of the imagination, yet he was firmly against the return of corporal punishment because of the sadistic behaviour of his headmaster. The man would can children for even the slightest fault, such as having a tie that wasn’t straight.

There is a problem with disruptive behaviour and violence in schools, but the solution isn’t corporal punishment. There’s a lot of pressure on schoolchildren already, with the requirement to do well at their sats and the other tests, which successive governments have seen fit to burden them. But apart from teaching them to pass exams, the goal of education should be to develop their talents. Stephen Fry attacking the Tories’ education policies under Maggie or John Major cited the Latin root of the word e-ducere: to lead out. The aim of education should be to lead out and develop the child and his or her talents and interests. Every good teacher not only wants to teach their subject, but to see their pupils actively enjoy it.

Corporal punishment and the vicious, sadistic discipline inflicted on past generations of children doesn’t do this. It has made too many children hate school, and the teachers and institutions that inflicted it. Bill Etheridge is simply wrong. On the other hand, if you want a new generation of beaten, brutalised, twitching and resentful ex-school kids, then he’s clearly the man for the job.

Gove and 19th Century British Education Provision

Michael Gove contemplating the government’s destruction of British state education

Unreasoning nostalgia is a British disease,

– Jon Downes and the Amphibians from Outer Space

Earlier this week the NUT staged a one-day strike against the government’s reforms of British schools. As with the rest of Conservative policy, this essentially consists in preparing the system for further privatisation and lowering wages and conditions. They also have their sights set on lowering standards as well. Taking their cue from the assumption of ignorant bar-room bores everywhere, the Tories have the attitude that just about anyone, or almost anyone, can teach without actually needing to be taught how. They are therefore trying to pass legislation to allow graduates to teach in schools without needing to have a teaching qualification first.

I did my first degree at a teacher-training college that also took ordinary degree students. The trainee teachers I knew were conscientious and worked extremely hard, both academically on their specialist subjects, and in the class-room during teaching practice. Often they were put in front of classes that could be difficult, stopping fights between pupils and sometimes with the threat of violence from parents. While there’s a lot of debate just how much of the theory of teaching and child development is relevant – the theories of Piaget have been extensively critiqued and rejected – it is nevertheless not an easy profession by any means. Teachers certainly need good training in how to teach, as well as what. All this will be undermined by Gove’s reforms.

Modern Conservatism is based on the view that laissez-faire, private industry is always best, and so looks back with nostalgia on the 19th century, when Britain dominated the world, we had an empire and industry was expanding. It was also an age of poverty, hunger, disease and overcrowding. And rather than being great, Britain in this respect had one of the worst education systems in western Europe.

France

In France, plans had been drawn up for a national system of primary, secondary and university education as long ago as 1806 under Napoleon. In practice, the regime got only as far as founding the lycees, the boarding schools for the elite. Under the education act of !833 drawn up by the French minister, Guizot, an impressive system of primary education was established. All communes were required to set up schools, which would provide education for local boys free of charge. The communes that could not afford to do so were to be given funding from their department, or, failing, that an annual grant from the Ministry of Public Instruction. As a result, in the thirteen years from 1834 to 1847 the number of primary schools in La Patrie increased from 33,695 to 43,514. By 1849 there were 3 1/2 million children attending primary school. Girl’s schools received much less funding, but nevertheless a law 1836 extended the 1933 Act to provide for schools for girls.

The French educational system was further reformed in 1863 under Napoleon’s minister for public instruction, Victor Duruy. Duruy was the Republican son of a worker in the Gobelins tapestry factory. He proposed to Napoleon III a system for the effective abolition of illiteracy, funding increases for secondary education, and increases in teachers’ salaries. Primary education was made compulsory, and a broader curriculum introduced for secondary schools. In 1866 nearly 66,000 pupils attended secondary school. The state also spent large sums on teachers’ salaries and in establishing good school libraries. In Matthew Arnold’s words, the French education system after Guizot had

given to the lower classes, to the body of the common people, a self-respect, an enlargement of spirit, a consciousness of counting for something in their country’s action, which has raised them in the scale of humanity.

Germany

Prussia had a ministry of public instruction and a system of local school boards from 1817 onwards. By the mid-19th century throughout all the German states primary education was compulsory. In Saxony, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, Baden and Prussia after 1857 parents had to send their children to the local state school. The age when children started school varied from state to state from five to eight years. In some parts of Germany school attendance was compulsory for a further eight years, so that the school leaving age was the same a century later. Unfortunately, education suffered through the use of child labour and widespread poverty, which took children out of the class room.

By 1837 Prussia already had a system of 50 gymnasia, set up to teach the children of the elite from 16 to 19. The curriculum was broader than that in France, and included philosophy, history, geography, arithmetic and geometry, as well as drawing and playing a musical instrument.

Austria

Under the liberal prime minister Auersperg in 1869 education became compulsory for all children from six to fourteen years of age. It has been seen by Harry Hearder, in his Europe in the 19th Century, 1830-1880, as more advanced than the British educational system introduced a year later. (p. 386). The parts of Italy under Austrian rule also benefited from this increase in education. In 1856 Lombardy possessed 4, 427 primary schools.

Switzerland and the Netherlands

The best schools in Europe were those in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Primary education had been made compulsory in most Swiss cantons in the 1830s, and Matthew Arnold considered Swiss schools superior to the French, with the schools in Aargau the very best in Europe.

In the Netherlands a system of state supervision of education had been established in 1806. Dutch schools were hygienic, with well-trained teachers, industrious and happy children, complete religious toleration and no corporal punishment.

Britain

There were a number of schools giving some form of education. These included the Dame Schools, in which an old woman kept a class of children quiet while their parents worked and the charity and Sunday schools. These were essentially religious in nature, and although there were 1 1/2 million pupils in Sunday schools in the 1830s, their pupils were not taught to write or do sums. There result was that there were high rates of illiteracy. By 1851 the literacy rate for men was about 69.3 per cent, and for women 51 per cent.

Under Dr James Kay-Shuttleworth in 1840 schools receiving state grants were obliged to adhere to certain standards, and in 1856 the Department of Education was set up. Nevertheless, a national system of education did not exist until the education act of 1870.

The children of the upper classes attended the grammar and public schools. There was, however, no national system of universal secondary education until 1880, or really, before the 20th century.

University Attendance in England, France, Germany and German Austria

The English universities were intended to produce a small, educated elite, unlike those in France, Italy, German Austria and Germany, which aimed at producing a larger cultured or professional class. As a result, in the 19th century far fewer people in England had the benefit of a university education. In France 1 in 1,900 citizens attended uni. In Italy, this was 1 in 2,200. In Germany and German-speaking Austria, it was 1 in 2,600. In Britain less than half as many had a university education one in 5,800 men.

British Education Dominated by Conservative Aristocratic Bias

Hearder therefore says of the British education system that it suffered from a narrowly aristocratic attitude. If the English upper class was as well educated as that of any other in Europe, the rest of the population remained wretchedly ignorant and neglected. (p. 388).

This attitude still persists in contemporary Tory attitude to education. Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are Toffs, who seem intent on pricing higher education out of the grasp of the lower middle and working classes with their raising of tuition fees. The educational reforms seem designed to wreck state education, leaving it purely run for the profit of private companies and unable to compete with the private schools. This seems partly intended to allow the wealthy to continue to the enjoy their educational and social privileges without having to worry about competition from the poorer children of the state sector.

And supporting this assault on state education is the popular belief, at least amongst some of the electorate, that this must raise standards because private is automatically better, as demonstrated by British imperial and industrial greatness during the 19th century. Britain, however, does not compare well in the sphere of mass education during the 19th century. The state systems of many nations, especially France, appear far better. If we genuinely care about giving a good education to our children, we should be looking to them, not back to a mythical age of imperial glory that promotes an attitude of indifference or active hostility to genuine, popular, state education.