I’m a council tenant on the Nightingale estate in Hackney, Back in February, I received a formal letter from Hackney council informing that in the coming financial year (i.e., from April 2003), there would be changes in the way in which my rent is assessed. I claim Income Support, which for an ordinary claimant would about to about £50 or £60 per week. Being in receipt of Housing Benefit also qualifies you for Housing benefit, and so for the last few years I’ve had to pay around £3:20 out of my Income Support to make up the shortfall in the rent. However, under these new rules – clearly designed by council bureaucrats to claw back the massive debts that the council has incurred through its gross mismanagement of funds, kickbacks, and general endemic corruption from those who can least afford it – the rent remains the same, but is now divided into ‘actual rent’ (that is to say, the ground rent), and charges for services. Local councils will pay actual rent, but what they won’t do is stump up for charges for services, as anybody who has ever filled in one of their forms will know.

What this means is that if you have a half-decent job (should anybody ever invent such a thing) and you aren’t a claimant, then this will make no difference to your circumstances whatsoever. On the other hand, if like me you’re living on the breadline then you’ll have to find the difference yourself, from nowhere, out of money that you obviously don’t have, due to your status as an impoverished claimant. It’s not as if you even have the option to decline the services provided, and for example offer to clean the communal hallway or mow your side of the park yourself: the rent is still the rent. The difference – in my particular case – between the ‘actual rent’ and the full rent, they told me, came to £22:47 per week. I was further informed that Housing Benefit would be letting me know if they could pay any or all of this in due course.

The formal confirmation of this arrived a couple of days ago, and I will now have to find £15 weekly instead of only about £3. In my opinion, this knocks even the Poll Tax into a cock-eyed hat. The mistake that the British state made in that instance could be summarised as attacking everybody at the same time; this time however, Hackney council are attacking only the very poorest of us all at the same time. How many of us will be affected by this? How many of us will be facing eviction in six months’ time once the arrears build up? We will be paying – once more, I might add – for their corruption and their mismanagement and their backhanders.

But it’s not over. Not yet. The one thing that they haven’t creatively accounted for is the untapped mass of our collective power. Away from the television and the aseptic mush of the sham that they designate as popular culture we have an enormous strength, and one that is not the relic of any bygone age, as they would have us believe.

Are there any takers?