[Diggers350] Campaign to Abolish Eviction: Kevin Cahill's secure home manifesto

[Tony Gosling]

The Land Is Ours Campaign To Abolish Eviction

https://tlio.org.uk/eviction/

The Earth is a free gift to mankind, and we all 
need our small inviolable chunk for a secure 
home. As land is enclosed and privatised, 
commodified and financialised a secure home becomes less and less affordable.

Secure shelter is SUPPOSED, under 
<https://tlio.org.uk/heralding-article-25-a-peoples-strategy-for-world-transformation/>Article 
25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 
to be a right yet the housing bubble means more 
and more of us are being made landless all the 
time. The right to shelter is being constantly 
ERODED. If landlords were no longer able to evict 
tenants, the housing bubble would burst.

The simplest way to enforce the right to shelter is to ABOLISH EVICTION.

We welcome all groups and individuals to 
affiliate or join us by sharing the Anti Eviction 
Campaign logo, Kevin Cahill’s manifesto below, and linking to this page.

Emacs!



Abolish Eviction Manifesto: Securing the right to a home in 2024

by Kevin Cahill. 26th April 2024

On a planet whose origins we are still 
discovering, in a universe whose nature still 
eludes us, we are the only known intelligent life so far found.

So here we are, all eight or so billion of us. We 
are, to put it mildly, slow learners. We glorify 
the military and murder each other far too 
frequently, in wars that should never happen in 
the first place. There is a human right of self 
defence, of course. But there is no such thing as 
a just war. The earliest effect of almost all 
wars is the hunting out of their shelters, of 
human beings, most often women and children. 
There are laws attempting to protect housing in 
time of war. This has not stopped Israel 
demolishing about 90% of all civilian homes in 
Gaza, in it alleged ‘just war’ against Hamas.

But out of the rubble of history we can discern 
three basic rights that should persist across the 
earth, at all time and in all places.

The three basic UDHR rights that precede all others.

<https://tlio.org.uk/heralding-article-25-a-peoples-strategy-for-world-transformation/>These 
are the right to life, the right to shelter and the right to food and water.

To work, those rights have to be supported by law 
and those laws have to be applicable locally and 
internationally. They must be free. Rights 
exercisable in remote courts, or at a financial 
cost which might not be payable, are not rights at all.

This document is mainly about the 2nd right, the right to shelter.

Put simply, if you are born on a hillside in a 
storm the first right, the right to life, is 
already in jeopardy, for parent and child. It 
follows that the right to shelter and a home are 
essential for all human beings, from the very beginning of life.

Historically, shelter began with caves as far as 
we can tell. Nowadays, and that is what we have 
to deal with here, homes in the form of houses 
and flats are present in most countries. These are what shelter is.

In the more bureaucratic and urbanised countries 
private home ownership is now common, but subject 
to various, sometimes hidden, legalities.

The most insidious of these is leasehold, a 
system where some previous owner of the site or 
land, continues to exercise the right to impose 
financial charges, sometimes in perpetuity. The 
fallacious notion here is that ownership rights 
are hereditary and perpetual. They are neither.

This will, no matter how presentationally 
benevolent, always pose a threat to the need for 
any form of occupation to be secure.

Security of tenure is inherent to the right to 
shelter. Without security of tenure, the right to shelter doesn’t work.

The idea of leasehold, prevalent in the UK and 
its former colonial possessions, arises on the 
essentially false idea that the monarch, in a 
theory made popular by Roman emperors around 2000 
years ago, is the ultimate owner of all land. In 
this way the right to shelter is subordinated to 
an essentially capitalist type system with the 
rights of the occupants subordinated to historic 
financial constraints. This is a reversal of how 
things should properly work, with long term 
fabricated extensions of ownership, often arising 
originally from theft or robbery, subordinated to 
the current occupants right to a secure shelter. 
The capitalist system won’t implode or collapse 
if this is done. It will simply operate in the 
right order, with basic rights framing the basic 
financial conditions, as opposed to the other way round.

Again, in the current situation most of the 
world’s financial systems take one form or 
another of unreformed capitalism, even in 
one-party communist states like the People’s 
Republic of China. Under most socialist systems 
the right to a home or shelter appears to be 
guaranteed but is often as lost in socialist 
bureaucracy as are homes in so-called capitalist systems.

In the UK and Ireland there is a dual system of 
housing based on freehold and leasehold, in which 
freehold is assumed ‘absolute’ which it is not. 
But it does function because the ultimate legal 
landowner in the Republic of Ireland, which is 
the state, and in the UK, which is the Crown, do 
not normally interfere in freehold dwellings. But 
these anomalies focus us on why the commonest 
human need for a secure home arises; this is the 
family unit of parents and children, commonly, 
but not universally, a mother and a father and 
children. If families are to have secure home 
ownership the family has to be the significant 
legal determinant in the basic legal 
arrangements. In countries where divorce is 
common, such as the UK and the USA, the system 
has adapted but with great clumsiness, excessive 
bureaucracy and excessive cost. This is 
complicated by the fact that in both those 
countries a home is also a capital asset, in a market place.

These two perspectives on bricks-and-mortar 
housing, firstly as a human need and secondly as 
a freely tradable investment are fundamentally 
incompatible. So the latter has to go.

In the late 1800s when the US was still 
parcelling out the land stolen from the 
indigenous peoples of the territory, the 
homesteads on offer, which usually included 
farmland, were legally created in an absolute 
form of ownership, sometimes known as allodial. 
The disadvantage here was that the occupier 
couldn’t raise a mortgage on the ‘homestead’.

So how to find a workable system of shelter or 
housing, that meets the 2nd fundamental human 
right, the right to shelter. And is secure?

The first step is relatively simple but may take years to evolve.

You place the financial structures affecting 
shelter in a legally subordinate role to the right itself.

The right to shelter defines the conditions under 
which shelter is provided. Not the other way 
round. That way a system, such as that in the UK 
and the USA, where there is a developed housing 
market that is a very large element of the 
financial system, has to accommodate two key 
elements of the right to shelter; the right to 
security of tenure, and an absolute right not to 
be deprived of shelter for arbitrary or financial 
reasons, with the burden of providing shelter 
delegated, irresponsibly, to the state, or rather the taxpayer.

One of the most successful historical experiments 
in effecting the provision of near universal 
housing or shelter, happened in what is now the 
Republic of Ireland. During an extended war of 
independence, variously datable from 1840 (and 
Daniel O’Connell) to the Irish Free State in 
1921, the colonial occupier Great Britain, 
directly linked to a great many of the landowners 
in Ireland, found their Irish relatives being 
made bankrupt by the landless locals refusing to 
pay rents on their smallholdings on which they 
had no security of tenure. The Imperial 
government in London started a process of bailing 
out their associates in Ireland in the 1870’s. 
And thus began the process of creating a large 
element of freeholds, dwellings and small 
holdings, in Ireland. That process, accelerated 
by an unnecessary famine in 1845, which was 
accentuated by Government and local landowner 
mismanagement and grotesque incompetence, killed 
or drove into exile a quarter of the islands 
population. The famine collapsed confidence in 
the Imperial government and their Irish landlord 
associates, of being capable of delivering the 
first right, the right to life. The Irish figured 
that you needed possession and security of 
tenure, to safely keep a roof over your head. At 
one time recently the scale of freehold home 
ownership in the Irish Republic reached 81.8% (in 2003)

After a series of calamities within the 
unreformed capitalist system that figure had 
fallen to 68.1% by 2014, but was still one of the 
highest in the world. Ireland now has a rental 
and housing market infested with capitalist 
vulture funds and the kind of bandit capitalism 
that hit Russia after the fall of the Soviet 
Union in 1991, according to the ultra capitalist George Soros.

Emacs!


Along with the vulture funds have come something 
almost unknown in the Republic of Ireland since 
the end of the famine period; repossessions, evictions and homelessness.

What the Irish Republic demonstrates is the need 
to have the three first rights firmly in situ, 
before you let unreformed capitalist carpetbaggers loose in the place.

The UK staggered into private home ownership, 
slowly, mostly after World War 1 (1914-1918), 
mostly by mistake and unconsciously.

Despite the invasion of the current market by 
leasehold and other financial ‘diseases’, private 
home ownership stands at just 50% of the 
population. About 20% of the UK population lives 
in social housing (renting a council or housing 
association home) Another 20% rent privately. The 
UK is currently suffering both a housing shortage 
at crisis levels, and rising homelessness, again.

During the Thatcher era a pretence was made of 
increasing private home ownership using the 
slogan ‘a property owning democracy’. The 
Thatcher government initiated a policy of selling 
off council housing to the tenants, forgetting or 
failing to invest the proceeds of sale with the 
councils so they could replace the sold off 
dwellings. This generated a significant shortage 
of new homes for sale or rent, in the market 
place, where those in possession of homes saw 
significant capital appreciation. And the market 
place saw a significant increase in rented homes, 
which may have been the Thatcher policy all along.

Politically its much easier to deal with renters 
in insecure dwellings, than with independent but 
bolshy freehold owners. In principle, the idea of 
a property owning democracy is a valid one. It 
gives the owner a degree of security and a stake 
in the currently unavoidable capitalist system. 
But it will only work if all homes, rented as 
well as freehold, have the same basic legal security of tenure.

Renting is much commoner on the continent of 
Europe but home ownership is growing in 
popularity. Renters on the continent, if they 
don’t have a basic right to security of tenure, 
have stronger legal protection against arbitrary eviction than in the UK.


Ownership and eviction

Security of tenure is the key to the successful 
restructuring of the actual housing market. This 
applies to the freehold ownership market as well. 
Neither corporations nor individuals should 
possess the right of eviction, for arbitrary or 
unexplained reasons, against people who own or rent.

With all dwellings protected by law, and with the 
well established legal principle of equality of 
arms applied to all transactions affecting a 
dwelling, the burden of proof must fall on the 
party seeking eviction, with dwellers, renters 
and freeholds given access to legal aid to 
balance the alleged rights of ‘owners’ This can 
be done using insurance but the appalling 
imbalance between owners and renters needs to be 
reversed. Rented property needs to be subject to 
registration, with offshore ownership prohibited. 
And subject to regular inspection against a set 
of standards without which a licence to rent should not be issued, at all.

The issue of ownership of land in the UK is the 
actual determinant according to which the housing 
stock, for sale or rent, reaches the market. The 
UK remains subject to huge and unregistered 
landed estates, mostly in rural areas. But its 
from the periphery of those estates that building 
land mostly emerges. Many of those estates are 
owned offshore, to avoid tax. The land registry 
needs total reform, so that the actual ownership 
of all landed estates and land, is, by law, 
located in the UK. And a legally responsible agent appointed.

There is no ancient right that says that 
‘flogging off’ bits of land via a company in 
Switzerland or the Caribbean, should enable the 
owner, usually resident in the UK, to avoid 
capital gains tax, in the UK. Properly imposed 
capital gains tax makes land development tax 
simply another way of making extracting taxes 
from the super-rich, too complex to happen. Apart 
from the fact that most of the land that might 
have had a development land tax imposed on it is 
long gone into bricks and mortar already.

The United Kingdom, alongside most of Europe, is 
possessed of so-called ‘human rights laws’, none 
of which, however, include a right to secure 
tenure of a dwelling. To do so might 
inconvenience the bandits of unreformed capitalism, loose in our midst.

The European version, a gift from the UK, is 
called the European Convention of Human Rights. 
Both the UK and European human rights statutes 
contain a right to privacy which is now, despite 
all the vast and catastrophically expensive 
bureaucracy involved, extinct. This has happened 
in two ways, one of them pertinent to the need 
for a right to security of tenure as a basic 
right. Initially the UK Parliament transferred, 
via legislation, the agency for privacy, from the 
individual holder, to a part of the bureaucracy, 
the Information Commissioners Office.

That peculiar institution then arranged to hide 
itself behind over 900 pages of ‘regulatory 
balderdash’ relating to privacy. Far away in 
Strasburg, the European Court of Human Rights 
says that to bring a rights case to the court you 
must exhaust the issue in your local courts. 
Doing that in the UK, with professional legal 
support will set you back between £100,000 and £500,000, or more.

So, wedged between domestic bureaucratic 
corruption and incompetence, and political 
deviance, the distance between a workable right 
of any kind that an individual can use, are 
oceans of prohibatory regulation growing at the 
same rate as the distant cosmos and as useful to 
an ordinary citizen as is the ever enlarging 
periphery of that infinite universe.


Protection from eviction: a new Bill of Rights

The counter revolution in the UK needs to start 
with a constitution that jails people who breach 
it. Then, after the right to life, a right to 
security of tenure for each individual’s 
dwelling. And finally a land registry that 
records all landowners in the UK and taxes, in 
the UK, those who sell land, on any basis, in the UK.

The second way privacy was destroyed was by 
direct criminal attack. The UK House of Commons 
set out the facts, twice, naming the criminals on 
17th April 2018 and again on 14th Feb 2019. The 
UK media never reported the Parliamentary 
evidence, itself bound up with possibly the 
greatest case of corporate tax dodging ever 
perpetrated in the UK, by the same OCG (Organised 
Criminal Group) which had destroyed privacy. 
Central to both crimes was excessive but non 
functional and corrupt bureaucracy, and laws 
which were worked around, mainly by lawyers, for money.

At the western end of the UK’s parliament 
building is the Victoria Tower. The tower 
contains most of the statutes enacted in the UK 
over hundreds of years. A good way to begin a 
revolution of rights would be to burn the Victoria Tower to the ground.

The object of most of the statutes in the Tower 
is to empower the powerful, protect the rich and 
demolish any rights that ordinary people might 
have. In recent years the statute book has become 
the means by which privacy was extinguished and 
tax dodging sanctioned. The statute book is 
actually a criminal instrument, not a repository of law.

And the first three rights in a new bill of 
rights, should be the right to life, then the 
right to security of a dwelling and finally the 
right to food and water. After that maybe we 
could start a whole new statute book, written for the people, by the people?



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