[Diggers350] Bristol's GRC: Bailiffs in Balaclavas

[Clive Menzies]

Thanks Tony

In similar vein from Chicago:
https://www.activistpost.com/2018/01/city-tells-man-stop-sheltering-homeless-cold-theyll-take-house.html

Happy New Year and keep up the good work :-)

Regards

Clive

On 05/01/18 13:03, Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk [Diggers350] wrote:
>
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> BAILIFFS IN BALACLAVAS
> http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/back-issues 
> <http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/back-issues>
> CHAPTER 7 NEWS – ISSUE 22 – WINTER 2018
> http://tlio.org.uk/bristols-grc-bailiffs-in-balaclavas/
>
> <http://tlio.org.uk/bristols-grc-bailiffs-in-balaclavas/>Paramilitary 
> eviction squads, High Court injunctions, deportations, torched 
> dwellings  - these are the legacy of the 2012 anti-squatting laws, 
> writes TONY GOSLING, reporting from Bristol.
>
> Before dawn on 23 November 2016 around 25 men dressed in black with 
> masked faces, turned up equipped with sledgehammers, crowbars and dogs 
> at a squat in a commercial building in Barton Hill, Bristol. They 
> broke in through a window and two doors and once inside ordered the 
> six petrified Spanish residents to "get on the floor". Eventually, the 
> squatters were ordered to leave the premises with their hands up in 
> the air. When the police turned up in response to the squatters' 999 
> call they spoke to the bailiffs only, before driving off.
>
> This was the first strike by the firm Graham Rose Consultants (GRC) 
> who see themselves as "entrepreneurs" opening up a new market in 
> illegal evictions. They claim to help landowners use so called "Common 
> Law" to evict gypsies and travellers trespassing on open land, and 
> will remove squatters "without the need to go through a lengthy court 
> process."
>
> Since then GRC have carried out several other evictions by force and 
> without court orders. On 14 February 2017, about ten of their bailiffs 
> arrived with power cutters at 6am at the empty Greencore warehouse in 
> Bristol's St Philip's district occupied by two squatters. On 18 May, 
> eight bailiffs broke into the abandoned Bristol Tile Factory warehouse 
> in Fishponds Road to evict half a dozen squatters from a retail unit 
> where local groups have campaigned against a planned McDonalds.
>
> GRC's business model is to break in to lawfully occupied buildings 
> before the police arrive, hoping that residents will be intimidated 
> out, vigilante style. This is illegal so the raids are organised with 
> military precision since they have to commit the criminal damage and 
> gain entry to the property under cover of darkness and before police 
> arrive. The fact that such a confrontation will, on occasions, turn 
> violent seems to be part of the adrenalin draw for those they employ, 
> who are always dressed in black and wear balaclavas - in the Greencore 
> operation, one wore a skull mask. In the Tile Factory attack, they 
> carried CS spray canisters, side batons and body armour along with the 
> usual sledgehammers.
>
> Squatters have described the GRC masked bailiffs as behaving like 
> riot-trained police officers, down to the barked orders and 
> mannerisms. Many of them have Welsh accents and one has a Welsh red 
> dragon flag sewn onto his black jacket. Squat- ters have not forgotten 
> that it was mostly Welsh police who were brought over to Bristol to 
> kick off Stokes Croft's so-called "Tesco riots" in April 2011.
>
> The clauses criminalising squatting in residential properties and 
> removing legal aid for the homeless in the 2102 Legal Aid, Sentencing 
> and Punishment of Offenders Act are ideal for unscrupulous bailiffs 
> like GRC. This law tends to force squatters into industrial estates 
> away from eyewitnesses, and encourage landlords and bailiffs to carry 
> out criminal evictions in the knowledge that without legal aid, 
> squatters are less likely be able to challenge them through the 
> courts. News of these violent evictions has spread around the Bristol 
> homeless community, discouraging people from squatting commercial 
> properties.
>
>
>     *Tent City*
>
> As squatting buildings becomes more difficult, homeless people are 
> resorting to living in tents. There are several encampments tucked 
> away in parks and scraps of wood- land within a mile of Bristol's city 
> centre. Until now the bailiffs have left them alone, but the tent 
> dwellers face other hazards.
>
> First of these is Bristol Council, which in 2016, under the Labour 
> mayor Marvin Rees, engaged personnel to wait until tent dwellers left 
> their site empty in order to confiscate their tents. Since this was 
> theft, the council was forced to abandon this policy. Instead it 
> applied for an injunction against a "Tent City" of ten residents in 
> Peel Street Park in the Easton area of Bristol, forbidding them to 
> camp on any council-owned parks and derelict spaces. Bristol Housing 
> Action Movement (BHAM) initiated a fundraising campaign and engaged 
> Derek McConnell from South West Law, who managed to get the ban 
> reduced to just that park for only six months. Tent City moved to 
> another site.
>
> Another hazard is the charity St Mungo's whose outreach team roam the 
> streets engaging and identifying the city's rough sleepers, ostensibly 
> with a view to getting them one of the rare available beds in a 
> hostel. Identity checks by these "helpers of the homeless" are being 
> handed on to the Home Office eager to deport any migrant with no 
> visible means of support. In May two Polish men living at Tent City 
> were jailed for several months in the former Navy prison at Portland, 
> and one was sent back to Poland. St Mungo's, some readers may recall, 
> was a partner in Ealing Council's award-winning "beds in sheds" 
> enforcement campaign, which was specifically designed to "tackle 
> illegal immigrants and illegal employment practices." (See The Land 19 
> p 59).
>
> Then one evening in September 2017 the occupants of Tent City left the 
> site to visit a soup kitchen. They returned to find that arsonists had 
> torched many of their tents with all their belongings inside. BHAM 
> again came to the rescue: it found alternative squatted accommodation 
> and organised an appeal for money to replace the burnt possessions. 
> One of the activists told the Bristol Post: "With winter a few months 
> away it is very important that we provide the duty of care that 
> Bristol City Council will not".
>
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> /Thanks to Isabel Burnett - who helped research GRC and submitted an 
> article to The Bristol Cable in early summer 2017, which wasn't published.
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> /
> From South America, where payment must be made with subtlety, the 
> Bormann organization has made a substantial contribution. It has drawn 
> many of the brightest Jewish businessmen into a participatory role in 
> the development of many of its corporations, and many of these Jews 
> share their prosperity most generously with Israel. If their proposals 
> are sound, they are even provided with a specially dispensed venture 
> capital fund. I spoke with one Jewish businessmen in Hartford, 
> Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown several years before 
> our conversation, but with Bormann money as his leverage. Today he is 
> more than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the community with a 
> certain share of his profits earmarked as always for his venture 
> capital benefactors. This has taken place in many other instances 
> across America and demonstrates how Bormann’s people operate in the 
> contemporary commercial world, in contrast to the fanciful nonsense 
> with which Nazis are described in so much “literature.”
>
> So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish participation in Bormann 
> companies that when Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv to 
> stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the Jewish and German 
> communities of Buenos Aires. Jewish leaders informed the Israeli 
> authorities in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again 
> because a repetition would permanently rupture relations with the 
> Germans of Latin America, as well as with the Bormann organization, 
> and cut off the flow of Jewish money to Israel. It never happened 
> again, and the pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of these 
> Jewish leaders. He is residing in an Argentinian safe haven, protected 
> by the most efficient German infrastructure in history as well as by 
> all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
> http 
> <http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O> 
> ://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/ 
> <http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O> 
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-- 
Clive Menzies

www.freecriticalthinking.org

Who rules, how and why?

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