It's Not Me, It's You!

I'm still homeless because the world changed around me.

It is Easter Sunday, 31st March 2024, I’m sitting in Central London and trying to understand how on earth I’ve been homeless for fifteen years.

As a child, growing up in the seventies and eighties, I was constantly informed that knowledge and schooling were absolutely everything. Get yourself a good education, read every day, never stop learning and you’ll be unstoppable, was the mantra that my late (foster) mother, Betty Toy, imparted to me daily.

Until 2008, this advice was proven absolutely true. By sixteen, in 1984, I’d figured out enough from life to set-up a home of my own and moved from the tiny mining community in Ystrad Mynach, where I was brought up, to the relatively new capital of Wales, Cardiff.

By twenty-one I was setting up my third and most successful business in the city, at least by my measure. It was something that no one had ever done before, it was achieved against impossible odds, it was known throughout the British Isles, having appeared in The Sun, BBC News and Vogue Magazine and had also accomplished a British record, being the first business to offer next day delivery in the UK; A Touch of Silk never made a profit though, but then, that was never its point. I’d just bought my flat, which would become the only home I owned in my life, in the salubrious area of Gabalfa, and was studying at one of the most prestigious Business Schools of its day; CARBS - Cardiff Business School, a few minutes walk away from my front door.

Knowledge, intelligence and perseverance were all rewarded at that time. But by 2008, residing in my shared two bedroom apartment in Waterloo on the banks of the River Thames, overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a year before my homeless journey began, the storm clouds of change were already gathering. I was very well aware of their impending doom, as the financial markets collapsed and the powers that be felt the poor should pay for their failures through austerity, but I couldn’t help but still believe that I would master and overcome whatever life would throw at me as I always had.

Afterall, I’d survived being abandoned as a baby; being the only Black child in an all White community, then years later, in just a twelve month period broke through the barriers of low expectation of others to get my “O” Levels (GCSE) at Lewis Boys School Pengam, whilst residing in a Children’s home 12 miles away in Pontypridd. Moved to a family unit home when I entered sixth form in Radyr Comprehensive that Autumn, an elite public intake school, because everyone presumed I’d be going to an Oxbridge college. I met my biological mother, our first encounter since she’d left me at 6 weeks old. Took the state to court to get myself out of care. Left school. Got a job and a new home of my own and survived the resulting agoraphobia of all that stress, that forced me then to lose both… I could go on and on, but you get the point.

I was therefore prepared to take on any challenge thrown at me; except of course the one that came. That took the form of discovering that my greatest attributes were to become my biggest weaknesses. It turns out I shouldn’t have worried about the reading, the education, the degree or trying to achieve greatness, I should have just taken the boring and exploitative bank job I was offered as part of the university milk-round and did the thing I had no interest in whatsoever - made a lot of money.

That’s the thing I never saw coming though; that Britain would turn empathetically illiterate, and in essence, become America. The resulting stupidity of that would lead us all to pursuing money not health; funding corrupt bankers, not ending poverty and homelessness; and replacing the likes of our historic philanthropists, the ilk of Carnegie, Peabody, Barnardos & Guinness, with CEOs of Third Sector organisations earning £100,000 salaries instead, and in turn ending the notion of charity in our country altogether.

It was that drive for money that created a debt industry, credit files and a lack of protections for customers should any of these organisations make errors, and is of course the reason I am currently homeless. A debt incorrectly attributed to my records with Experian & Equifax, prevented me from renewing my tenancy and the Information Commissioner's office took 18 months to correct it.

I wept when Tony Blair came into power in 1997. It was his idea to create a debt culture and his idea that charities should be run like businesses, and that Britain should have a Public, a Private, and his new idea of a Third Sector. While my politically left leaning friends all thought his arrival would be the greatest day for Britain - even though I was still at University - I already knew the reality, that it was going to be the demise of our welfare state. Thatcher had already pronounced him as her greatest accomplishment, as “He had to reinvent the party for any chance of being elected”

I knew Blair would go after those who were Single parents - he cut lone parent benefits within a year of his premiership - because he had already established his views on Christian family values.  Then he went after those disabled, bringing in the French company ATOS to rid the country, as he claimed, of the one million people languishing on disability benefits, by allegedly testing their abilities to do work and then penalising them if they didn’t do any menial task forced upon them - regardless of the impact that may have on their health. He even began to privatise the NHS through his Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

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This of course all happened two years after I’d first been diagnosed with my ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)

To this day, the notion of legally mandating how much someone needs to live on, in order to decide what payments are required from the DWP, and then using the removal of that life requiring pittance to penalise someone ill or disabled, remains the most shameful thing British Society has ever permitted in my lifetime - and that includes the illegal invasion of Iraq.

A decade later, when David Cameron took over the role, the notion of the workshy, lazy, benefit scrounger had been so well established into the British psyche that the country genuinely believed that there were two separate groups in our society - those that work, you know, that nonsensical hard working family rhetoric,“The Good”; and those who rightfully claim their National Insurance, the shirkers, “The Bad” added to which are the economically unproductive; the intellectuals, the artists, the creatives, the entrepreneurs, who we’ll coin “The Ugly”. The public ignored the fact that we are in fact all the same group, with the only difference being a slight change of circumstances, one way or another, over time.

The healthy worker after twenty years of service, through ill health, becomes the welfare scrounging bum just twenty-four hours later.

So it really came as no surprise, when Westminster City Council Council, with just days' notice cancelled my booking in temporary accommodation just over a week ago, notifying me on my Birthday. The people who work in the DWP and local authorities believe the Blair propaganda hook line and sinker. Why wouldn’t they, It is of course reinforced by their bosses, our current government and mainstream press, nearly every day.

I spoke to Therese Coffey at the Institute For Government in February 2024 and asked why, when she was in charge, she didn’t replace all DWP payments with Universal Basic Income, the notion of paying everyone enough to live on, thus turning wages into something to earn to provide luxuries, not essentials, and thereby ridding ourselves of the notion of wage slavery.

She mocked me as if we weren't trialling the scheme all across Britain presently, but went on to say it would encourage people not to work. This seemed a strange focus as only 1% (£2Bn) of the DWP budget is paid out on unemployment anyway, the largest figure by far is retirement (£111Bn), followed by in work benefits (£46Bn - welfare for corporations) and then later, housing benefit (£25Bn - welfare for landlords).

Her thinking is the perfect example of why I find myself where I am and why my attributes work against me.

For instance, my knowledge of the law isn’t in the least bit helpful. Time and time again I beat the DWP in the courts, but then they repeat the same action against me and we end back in the same place, yet Judges tell me they have no authority to stop the cycle, which costs the state £100,000s.

Perseverance has clearly been useless too, fifteen years of filling in forms, scouring for legal aid lawyers to no avail, challenging corrupt thinking, highlighting solutions, working with MPs and Third Sector organisations all end me back in exactly the same place - utterly powerless.

I’ve been fired as a lived experience expert from Groundswell, for challenging the notion that Comic Relief should not have given them a £1/4 Million just to run a website, that at that point I was the major contributor to and instead used it to house people. Crisis, because I felt the money they’d received from Lloyds TSB should not be used for encouraging a Cashless society through this seemingly charitable promotion, but instead assist with discovering new ways of getting cash money, even if on Mastercard Gift Cards, to those experiencing homelessness, especially if they weren’t going to use this donated money to buy homes for people to live in; and Expert Link, again funded by Lloyds, because I criticised them for using the voices of those with Lived Experience as a means of generating income for the organisation, when they had no measurable benefits to show of anything else.

Intelligence is wasted on Buy To Let Landlords too, who think that renting out a second home isn’t actually a business, just a guaranteed way to make money. Only a few weeks ago when I was on the panel for University College London’s Policy and Practice Seminar on Homelessness, did a member of the audience say it was essential to maintain the no fault eviction, because it would be hard for her, if she couldn’t quickly rid herself of tenants making life difficult.

She utterly forgot the Free Market ethos, that you make profit because you undertake risk. If there weren’t troublesome tenants then there should be no profit in that market, it’s the only risk buy to let landlords have to endure. The property is financed by the bank, not them, they can underwrite any loss with insurance and they own an ever ascending asset. Property, over time, has never ever lost money, it dips and troughs, but over the last hundred years, the line has always travelled upwards.

So here I am, in the ludicrous dichotomy of a British 21st Century life. On one side of the coin, I’m recognised and venerated. My digital life is currently being taken into the London Metropolitan Archive, and with that organisation, we are planning a year-long programme of events for the public to explore the importance of archives, the fragility of digital diaries and social media and how learning from the people in the past can ensure we avoid their mistakes for the future.

It joins my Video Diary that was collected into the Museum of London, my Cartoon (written by me, drawn by Mike Stokoe), displayed and then housed at the Cartoon Museum, my films in the British Film Institute and my written work in the British library

Every week I enter the London Library as an Emerging Writer (2021/22) & the Royal Society of Arts as a Fellow, in order to write my memoir, with the apt title, Fighting The Dreamkillers, and a trade book for Bristol University Press entitled, Why Don’t People Help?: The Decline Of Civil Society In Britain And How We Can Reverse It, and three times a week, if I am able, I swim in the glorious nature of Hyde Park in the Serpentine lake as part of the Serpentine Swimming club.

I’m fortunate and have the wondrous gift of friendships, so someone has put me up over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, before I begin, next Tuesday, wasting yet more of my life, pursuing people in state funded institutions to follow the law and often their own policy, which they continually breach - seemingly just to cause as much distress as possible.

On the other side of the coin, instead of being supported for my fortitude, I am constantly penalised, undermined and bullied by the Council at every turn. I don’t have a penny to my name as the DWP disability benefits I am meant to be being paid aren’t, and not a single third sector homeless charity can assist. I am once again about to be threatened with losing all my possessions as Access Storage who want £400 a month (double what I was originally paying) to keep my possessions, because Arts Council England reneged on a deal that would have put them all in an art project and released me from their grip in 2022.

I’ve been evicted from temporary accommodation on a provable lie from Westminster City Council (they claimed Premier Inn cancelled the booking when staff told me it was the council), but every Legal-Aid lawyer or barrister I pursue to address this, tells me it is either too complicated a case for them to undertake or they simply don’t have the time or staff to accommodate it.

The Council have spent over £1/4 Million pounds housing me in temporary accommodation over the past four years; it would have made way more economic sense to have just bought me a property to meet my needs - during lockdown to get the best value for money - as they then would have owned an ascending asset and I’d have a home

But who the hell wants that kind of intelligent thinking in the 21st Century? Far better that we all continue to struggle, starve and die to make landlords and corporations rich and ensure the next generation is dumber than ever.

Finally, think on this; one hour of profits from Lloyds TSB, One Hour, is nearly £1/5 Million, so just give me two hours of their income and I could solve all my problems overnight and forever. Consider that the next time you wonder how we can fix homelessness in the UK and engender what both shades of politicians now say they need; the economically productive society.