Direct Action – We Salute The Guinness Trust Occupation In Brixton.

The Grenfell Action Group salutes the housing activists who are currently staging a brave occupation of a boarded up Council flat in the Guinness Trust buildings on the Loughborough Park Estate in Brixton in protest at the heartless and cruel eviction of existing tenants.

Please read about their struggle here and help attend an eviction resistance on the Estate this coming Thursday 19th Feb @ 9.30am:

 https://guinnessoccupation.wordpress.com/

 In the meantime, the editors of the Grenfell Action Group blog would like to assure our readers that we have not totally forgotten our commitment to highlighting and commenting on the everyday shenanigans on Lancaster West Estate, perpetrated against our community by the TMO and the RBKC Council. We can assure you that we will be returning to some of our more familiar themes in due course.

However, over the last few weeks our blog has included stories of housing struggles like the example above and elsewhere in the capital.  We make no apology for this. In fact, we believe that there are two important lessons to be learned from the insurgence of housing activism exemplified by affiliations such as The Radical Housing Network, Focus E15, Earl’s Court Area Action Group and Our West Hendon and why it is important for us to highlight them on our blog and publicise their methods.

First and foremost, the existence of these groups and their commitment to direct action proves that the housing crisis can be robustly responded to and that communities facing the threat of “regeneration” (ie social cleansing) are no longer alone and defenceless.

Secondly, we believe that right here under our noses in Kensington and Chelsea, the Cabinet Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration, Councillor Feilding Mellen, is set to unleash a ruthless scorched earth policy to eradicate social housing in the North of this most Rotten Borough and that RBKC council tenants and leaseholders have much to be fearful about.

We believe that Councillor Feilding Mellen is about to begin using the £283 million of Council Capital reserves (amassed by years of Tory underfunding of vital services to vulnerable adults and children) to bankroll the destruction of Lancaster West and other North Kensington housing estates with a view to destroying our communities and replacing them with soul-less multi-million pound flats and penthouses for sale to foreign investors.

We believe that Councillor Feilding Mellen and his perverted neo-con pals in Hornton Street are preparing to simply give away the land on which our treasured estates are currently situated to their greedy property developer friends and also supply them with the money so they can build houses for the super rich and the exploitation of the “buy to leave” market.

When these fascist and heartless policies come to be implemented the residents of Lancaster West and similar estates would do well to look at the examples of occupation at the Aylesbury Estate,

fightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com

and most recently at the Guinness Trust building on the Loughborough Park Estate in Brixton. There is currently an online petition to support the Guiness Trust tenants. You could help by signing this;

https://www.change.org/p/simon-dow-stop-the-social-cleansing-of-brixton-stop-the-evictions-of-tenants-from-loughborough-park-estate

We urge our readers to support these occupations in any way they can and also to support the current week of housing action called by the Radical Housing Network:

 http://radicalhousingnetwork.org/

Closer to home, we recognize that when Councillor Feilding Mellen comes after our homes we will need to be in a position to offer organised resistance. We would do well to recognise NOW that Focus E15, the Guinness Trust in Brixton, Our West Hendon and others in the Radical Housing Network, can offer help and solidarity and are already showing us the way forward. We should help them now. Solidarity!