Check out our news website Church and State to find out about our writers and read some amazing stories: http://churchandstate.org.uk. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the site; for details, see this blog's sidebar under "Church and State".
Our chairman in North Carolina, Dr Stephen Mumford, pays SiteGround $1,000 a year to ensure that our Church and State website runs smoothly, even with 100,000 daily visitors. We actually have a very good Cloud hosting package (2x3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 4GB RAM, and 20GB SSD), which is why we shouldn't be experiencing this sort of non-access to our site. Here is paragraph 12 of Declan's recent updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in respect of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 12 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations re the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
12. It is important to underscore that the discriminatory surveillance suffered by the Applicant and his wife is not an isolated event. Rather, it is emblematic of a larger pattern of surveillance by law enforcement officials in the UK that has been well-documented by international and domestic human rights bodies. For example, GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) specialises in the "4 D's": deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive. It has been branded by the press as the spy agency's "deception unit". Though its existence was secret until 2014, JTRIG has developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in "dirty tricks" like deploying sexual "honey traps" designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online. Previous reporting on GCHQ established its focus on what it regards as political radicalism. Beyond JTRIG's targeting of Anonymous, other parts of GCHQ targeted political activists and groups deemed to be "radical", even monitoring human rights NGOs. Simon Davies, president of the London-based Privacy International, asks: "If spying on human rights NGOs isn't off limits for GCHQ, then what is?"
UPDATE 1 7.15pm: I have emailed SiteGround for the reason behind this latest block.
UPDATE 2 7.27pm: SiteGround: "I have investigated your case and it turned out that the Apache web service was stalled and the server could not restart it. I have fixed that and the website is operational now."
The new London Mayor Sadiq Khan is a former chair of Liberty, which campaigns to protect civil liberties and promote human rights – through the courts, in Parliament and in the wider community. Declan emailed him this afternoon having learnt that the Greater London Authority (GLA) Tenancy Sustainment Team service, operated for the Mayor by St Mungo's, breached contract with us in case notes; and this after I revealed a three-week package of difficulties in my previous blog post, Financial Ombudsman Concern - The Royal Bank of Scotland Plc. Case No: 1812-7596/RY/CD10. This is the forwarded email titled "GLA St Mungo's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST): Breach of Contract":
Click to enlarge
For our next court action
... To pick out three particular historical examples fuelling this belief [re St Mungo's] that involve a High Court action and the threat of two small claims court actions:
(i) During the second period the Claimant and his wife spent on the street between April 2013 and May 2014, St Mungo's (then called Broadway) denied them support to access the private rented sector despite the fact that the Claimant had the funds to do so. On 29 August 2013, the Claimant filed a claim in the High Court for judicial review against Commissioner of Police for the City of London Adrian Leppard and Home Secretary Theresa May, arguing that it was unreasonable for the Police Force to refuse to ask the charity to help them break an alleged accommodation blockade whilst at the same time threatening them with hosings by street cleaners. Deputy High Court Judge Bidder ruled: "The refusal of the First Defendant to ask the charity 'Broadway' to engage or help the Claimant and his wife with their welfare or accommodation is not arguably unreasonable. It is not its job to intervene in any disagreement between a charity and those seeking that charity's help."
(ii) On 8 May 2015 District Judge Brooks sitting at the County Court at Central London declared that the Single Homeless Project had "acted unlawfully in holding or uploading information about the Claimant relating to his debts, his employment status and an alleged mental health condition", and ordered the charity to pay damages to him for distress of £750. However, three months later, following a subject access request, the Claimant discovered that St Mungo's had failed to comply with the court order which also requested that it remove from its website any information about him and his wife "in relation to debts that they have, their employment status and to specifically remove the word 'grandiose'." It took St Mungo's a further six months, and the threat on 11 February 2016 of an immediate small claims court action, to finally remove from its website all inaccurate financial and other information held against the Claimant and his wife.
(iii) On 5 April 2016 the Claimant issued St Mungo's CEO Howard Sinclair a Letter Before Claim in respect of the handling of his and his wife's personal information. The Claimant challenged as misleading the decision of the charity to mark his and his wife's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) support as closed when Housing First ceased on 31 March 2015 because "an exception was made for you in that you were not required to engage with TST", according to Mr Sinclair in an email dated 16 February 2016. The GLA had repeatedly falsely accused the Claimant and his wife in court papers of refusing support, something it could not have done had their support status been marked as 'open'. It took St Mungo's a further two weeks, and the threat on 18 April 2016 of an immediate small claims court action, to finally change the Claimant and his wife's status to 'open'.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
We have brought the following four actions to court orders just to keep a roof over our heads for the past two years:
Court action 1: High Court v Greater London Authority (1 September 2014), para 37(iii), p 13.
Court action 2: County Court v Single Homeless Project (12 September 2014), para 37(iii), p 13.
Court action 3: High Court v Greater London Authority (18 June 2015), para 36, p 12.
Court action 4: County Court v Greater London Authority (10 September 2015), para 36, p 12.
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Donations are our only source of income to keep our Church and State website going, so even a small amount will make a big difference! An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
With reference to RBS's response below, my business email address has always been dheavey@gmail.com and therefore did not require updating or necessitate the change of details alert I received on 9 May 2016. Further, the alert failed to identify who made the alleged change to my email address, thereby raising the serious concern that I could have been dealing with a hacker or other threat.
- Excerpt from Declan's formal complaint to the Financial Ombudsman concerning the Royal Bank of Scotland (incorporating NatWest Bank)
It has been a rough three weeks since I attended Newham's Volunteers' induction workshop on 4 May. I had no sooner returned from the workshop that afternoon than I lost access to the internet on my laptop into the next day (see here). This was followed after midnight by the unprecedented vandalization of this blog (see here and here). A few days later I came across in a gmail folder the bank alert below suggesting that Declan's N4CM bank account had been hacked (see here), which was followed last week by our loss of access to our Church and State website (see here). Last night Facebook issued me with a three-day block for the second time in six days (see previous blog post). And since 9 May I have been waiting to hear about a long-term volunteer position in a local community centre run by Newham Council. What's next?
Tomorrow morning I intend finishing our case against Facebook Ireland for the European Small Claims Court. True to form, Declan will no doubt rap it up in a couple of hours for filing at the Central London County Court. This is paragraph 38 of Declan's recent updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It cites the seven Facebook blocks we experienced between 1 December 2015 and 23 March 2016.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 38 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations citing seven Facebook blocks between 1 December 2015 and 23 March 2016.
38. At a preliminary hearing on 3 February 2016, District Judge Silverman ruled that the county court does not have the authority to intervene in what is an administrative dispute with a public body. The following incidents since the Applicant's lodgement of his claim in the county court in September 2015 - by no means exhaustive - serve to highlight the Applicant and his wife's high needs as a result of strong opposition and disruption:
(i) On 9 December 2015 the Applicant's wife's laptop was rendered useless for work after it was made technically incapable of publishing material on their Church and State website. She could solely not use her laptop to create a WordPress post, add images, or click on most of the platform's buttons. This could only have been an attack on her laptop because the platform worked perfectly well on the Applicant's laptop and on an old laptop they use as back up. She had posted videos of the attack to the N4CM blog before the device was mysteriously returned to normal functioning the following afternoon.
(ii) On 16 December 2015 the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) upheld the Applicant's complaint against the Ministry of Justice for breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO found that the Ministry had mishandled the Applicant's subject access request for a copy of the GLA's application to contest the court's jurisdiction, filed at Central London County Court on 14 October 2015 (see annex 19, pp 57-59).
(iii) In a letter to the Applicant dated 22 December 2015, Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown stated that she had written to the managing director of Facebook UK in her capacity as the Applicant's parliamentary representative to seek an explanation for why Facebook had twice blocked his wife from posting to groups and removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (1-4 December and 5-7 December 2015), without any stated reason or cause or responding to either of the Applicant's wife's appeals. The Applicant had already issued a Letter Before Claim to Facebook Ireland, the entity with which users based outside the USA and Canada have a contractual relationship, with a view to filing a legal claim with the European Small Claims Court.
(iv) On 3 February 2016, while the Applicant was at the hearing of his claim against the GLA, his wife received for the first time an alert from their hosting company SiteGround stating that the Church and State website had used 90% of its available storage and warning that the site could experience service problems without an upgrade. It took two days of correspondence between the Applicant's wife and SiteGround before this problem was rectified. According to a technical support supervisor, the reason for the 90% usage was "the cPanel upgrade done by our system administrators recently".
(v) Despite the contents of both letters cited in (iii) above, Facebook has additionally five times blocked the Applicant's wife from posting to groups (6-9 January, 12-15 January, 20-22 January, 13-16 February and 23-26 March 2016) and twice removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (6-9 January, 12-15 January 2016), without any stated reason or cause or responding to any of the Applicant's wife's five additional appeals. Facebook Ireland has not responded to the Applicant's pre-action letter of 15 December 2015, nor, to the best of his knowledge, has the managing director of Facebook UK responded to Shadow Home Office Minister Brown's letter of 22 December 2015.
Our chairman in North Carolina, Dr Stephen Mumford, pays SiteGround $1,000 a year to ensure that our Church and State website runs smoothly, even with 100,000 daily visitors. We actually have a very good Cloud hosting package (2x3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 4GB RAM, and 20GB SSD), which is why we shouldn't be experiencing this sort of non-access to our site. Here is paragraph 11 of Declan's recent updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in respect of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which hears complaints about surveillance by public bodies.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 11 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations re the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT)
11. The IPT was created in October 2000 by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and given the power to investigate any complaints against GCHQ, MI5 or MI6, as well as complaints about surveillance operations mounted by the police or any other public bodies. On 5 March 2014 the Guardian reported that the tribunal, which claims to be completely independent of the UK Government, is secretly operating from a base within the Home Office, by which it is funded. The newspaper found that the IPT had investigated about 1,500 complaints, and upheld only 10; five of these concerned members of one family who had all lodged complaints about surveillance by their local council. No complaint against any of the intelligence agencies had ever been upheld. The discovery that the IPT is lodged within a Whitehall department fuelled criticisms of the tribunal that had been levelled by rights groups, lawyers and complainants. The IPT's critics complain that the secrecy is excessive and that its procedures are stacked so heavily in favour of the government and against complainants that it is fundamentally unfair. According to the Guardian, some senior lawyers have described the IPT as "Kafkaesque", while one eminent barrister has dismissed it as "a kangaroo court". The newspaper also reports that as a consequence of the secrecy surrounding the tribunal and the perception that it is unfair, many would-be complainants spurn it.
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Donations are our only source of income to keep our Church and State website going, so even a small amount will make a big difference! An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
Who changed the details of Declan's NatWest N4CM business account without his consent or authority? This morning Declan brought his concerns to the attention of Royal Bank of Scotland CEO Ross McEwan.
... To pick out three particular historical examples fuelling this belief [re St Mungo's] that involve a High Court action and the threat of two small claims court actions:
(i) During the second period the Claimant and his wife spent on the street between April 2013 and May 2014, St Mungo's (then called Broadway) denied them support to access the private rented sector despite the fact that the Claimant had the funds to do so. On 29 August 2013, the Claimant filed a claim in the High Court for judicial review against Commissioner of Police for the City of London Adrian Leppard and Home Secretary Theresa May, arguing that it was unreasonable for the Police Force to refuse to ask the charity to help them break an alleged accommodation blockade whilst at the same time threatening them with hosings by street cleaners. Deputy High Court Judge Bidder ruled: "The refusal of the First Defendant to ask the charity 'Broadway' to engage or help the Claimant and his wife with their welfare or accommodation is not arguably unreasonable. It is not its job to intervene in any disagreement between a charity and those seeking that charity's help."
(ii) On 8 May 2015 District Judge Brooks sitting at the County Court at Central London declared that the Single Homeless Project had "acted unlawfully in holding or uploading information about the Claimant relating to his debts, his employment status and an alleged mental health condition", and ordered the charity to pay damages to him for distress of £750. However, three months later, following a subject access request, the Claimant discovered that St Mungo's had failed to comply with the court order which also requested that it remove from its website any information about him and his wife "in relation to debts that they have, their employment status and to specifically remove the word 'grandiose'." It took St Mungo's a further six months, and the threat on 11 February 2016 of an immediate small claims court action, to finally remove from its website all inaccurate financial and other information held against the Claimant and his wife.
(iii) On 5 April 2016 the Claimant issued St Mungo's CEO Howard Sinclair a Letter Before Claim in respect of the handling of his and his wife's personal information. The Claimant challenged as misleading the decision of the charity to mark his and his wife's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) support as closed when Housing First ceased on 31 March 2015 because "an exception was made for you in that you were not required to engage with TST", according to Mr Sinclair in an email dated 16 February 2016. The GLA had repeatedly falsely accused the Claimant and his wife in court papers of refusing support, something it could not have done had their support status been marked as 'open'. It took St Mungo's a further two weeks, and the threat on 18 April 2016 of an immediate small claims court action, to finally change the Claimant and his wife's status to 'open'.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
We have brought the following four actions to court orders just to keep a roof over our heads for the past two years:
Court action 1: High Court v Greater London Authority (1 September 2014), para 37(iii), p 13.
Court action 2: County Court v Single Homeless Project (12 September 2014), para 37(iii), p 13.
Court action 3: High Court v Greater London Authority (18 June 2015), para 36, p 12.
Court action 4: County Court v Greater London Authority (10 September 2015), para 36, p 12.
We were evicted from our previous flat on 14 March 2013 because according to our then live-in landlady's ex-husband, Dr Nigel McKenzie, a consultant psychiatrist in Highgate Mental Health Centre, our flat was needed for somebody with a mental illness. As Declan states in paragraph 8 of his complaint to the UN above, former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler also lived with human rights activist Belinda McKenzie in the same political 'safe house' for a couple of years until 2007. According to BBC Panorama, Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair"; he was jailed for seven weeks in 2002 for breaking the Official Secrets Act. It is indeed unfortunate that Shayler declared himself the Messiah in 2007, became a squatter, and was subsequently ridiculed in the press for changing his name to Delores Kane. A New Statesman article published in September 2006 featuring Shayler and Belinda gives no indication that Shayler believed he was the Messiah at that time; whilst a Daily Mail interview with him the following year reveals he believed himself to be Jesus by June 2007. He has never regained his normal self.
The Esquire article below* is mentioned in a Guardian article dated 27 March 2012. It is an eye-opener, highlighting the monitoring and surveillance that Shayler had to live with back in 2000, and the contradictory briefings and slanders that were coming out of the British establishment and the media. The author, Dr Eamonn O'Neill, is a lecturer in journalism at Strathclyde University.
*On 2 May 2013, Issuu removed this pdf from my Issuu account following a copyright complaint by Hearst Communications. I had uploaded the article to my Issuu account in December 2012. In March 2013, when last I checked, the article had been viewed more than 15,000 times. It can be read here.
BBC PANORAMA: The David Shayler Affair (August 1998)
Former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler "caused the biggest crisis of official secrecy since the spy catcher affair", according to BBC Panorama. He was jailed for seven weeks in 2002 for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
"On 9 December 2015 the Applicant's wife's laptop was rendered useless for work after it was made technically incapable of publishing material on their Church and State website. She could solely not use her laptop to create a WordPress post, add images, or click on most of the platform's buttons. This could only have been an attack on her laptop because the platform worked perfectly well on the Applicant's laptop and on an old laptop they use as back up. She had posted videos of the attack to the N4CM blog before the device was mysteriously returned to normal functioning the following afternoon."
- Paragraph 38(i) of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations
Still no internet on one of three laptops:
What a time we have had of it since I returned from Newham's Volunteers' induction workshop yesterday afternoon. This N4CM blog has been vandalized to an unprecedented extent (see previous two blog posts), and my laptop still has no access to the internet. This latest attack on my laptop - which now runs into a second day for only the second time since 9 December 2015 - reminds me of the removal of our flat door in 2012. What's next? Another ministerial complaint?
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Donations are our only source of income to keep our Church and State website going, so even a small amount will make a big difference! An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
UPDATE: Nine hours later and we still have no internet on one of three laptops:
As I stated in my previous blog post, our broadband provider is British Telecom (BT) but I am also mindful of Edward Snowden's revelation that Telecoms, internet providers, encryption and internet security companies are not only cooperating with the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on a daily basis, but they provide them with back doors into supposedly secure software. Below is paragraph 11 of Declan's recent updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in respect of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) who will not even consider our case.
HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM
COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE INTERNATIONAL
COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
Paragraph 11 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations re the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT)
11. The IPT was created in October 2000 by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and given the power to investigate any complaints against GCHQ, MI5 or MI6, as well as complaints about surveillance operations mounted by the police or any other public bodies. On 5 March 2014 the Guardian reported that the tribunal, which claims to be completely independent of the UK Government, is secretly operating from a base within the Home Office, by which it is funded. The newspaper found that the IPT had investigated about 1,500 complaints, and upheld only 10; five of these concerned members of one family who had all lodged complaints about surveillance by their local council. No complaint against any of the intelligence agencies had ever been upheld. The discovery that the IPT is lodged within a Whitehall department fuelled criticisms of the tribunal that had been levelled by rights groups, lawyers and complainants. The IPT's critics complain that the secrecy is excessive and that its procedures are stacked so heavily in favour of the government and against complainants that it is fundamentally unfair. According to the Guardian, some senior lawyers have described the IPT as "Kafkaesque", while one eminent barrister has dismissed it as "a kangaroo court". The newspaper also reports that as a consequence of the secrecy surrounding the tribunal and the perception that it is unfair, many would-be complainants spurn it.
'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Donations are our only source of income to keep our Church and State website going, so even a small amount will make a big difference! An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.
I am a former social psychologist from Madrid. My husband Declan, a former physical education teacher, is from Dublin. We came to England in 2003 from Ireland with the then-aim of forming a network organisation for those abused by church. We were twice forced, through no fault of our own, to live rough on the streets of London for almost 4 years in total, from November 2006 to July 2009 and from April 2013 to May 2014. Declan established Network for Church Monitoring as a nonprofit company limited by guarantee in 2011. We are currently living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' Section 21 eviction notice from our landlord, Peabody Trust housing association. This notwithstanding that our tenancy is a flat that falls under the Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (see paragraph 3 under "Church and State" below). We have no children.
MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE
(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)
1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.
2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).
3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).
4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.
5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.
"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC
Last updated: 26/06/21
_________________________
[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).
[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.
