When the word community is used it represents a community, which is the size of a local government constituency. A local government constituency normally covers about 5,000 houses and 11,000 residents. A community, which has been designated as a regeneration area, like here in my community, normally, covers an area, which is similar in size to a local government constituency. The regeneration initiatives are normally: New Deal for Communities (NDC), Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) or Neighbourhood Renewal Funding (NRF) and others. All of these funding sources are used to draw down European funding. Liverpool and Merseyside has been designated by the European Commission as an Objective One region and as such has received two lots of Objective One funding from Europe. The first round of Objective One funding 1992 amounted to around about £636m the second round 2002 amounted to £844m. This money can only be allocated to people who have what is called match funding i.e. for every £2 you put into a project they will give you £1. Of course there are stringent rules and the projects have to adhere to what the European Commission has stipulated. Complicated? You bet it is. It has been designed this way so as to put as many bureaucrats into as many useless jobs as possible to decipher the bureaucratic madness of Objective One funding. This is the money that all the rich property developers like The Duke of Westminster’s Grovnor Developments, Urban Splash, Rope Walks, Liverpool Vision, Neptune developments want to get their hands on. That’s why the Duke has hit town.

The above people care nothing about poor people; all they care about is money and profit. These people are like masters of the Universe. All the standing armies and the police force are there to protect them and the bureaucrats in Government’s Office for Merseyside and at local government level i.e. the council, are there to perpetuate the agendas of this dominant culture and to make sure that the lions share of funding ends up in their hands. We, the community only get the crumbs that are left on the table. They are even using the £62m New Deal for communities funding, which has been allocated to my community, as a further tool to gentrify the community through mass demolition and the eventual decimation of the whole community. The most insidious aspect of what is happening here is that the 13,000 residents who live in the New Deal area, in many cases unknowingly, actively participate in their own subjugation by the bureaucratic service providers who represent the above dominant cultures agendas.

The RSL’s and Local Government:

With the massive increase in computers use and digital video cam corders it is now possible for activist to put together documentaries and to burn the documentaries and commentaries onto CD’s, which can be viewed on DVD’s. These DVD discs, which will only cost about 12p each can be posted into any given community to give that community an oppositional insight into whatever is relevant to the community.

One of the main issues in any poor community is housing. As has often been reported on Indymedia, especially over the last couple of weeks, is the disgraceful behaviour of housing associations, which are now known as Registered Social Landlords (RSL’s), and the inability of central government’s Housing Corporation to hold RSL’s and councils accountable for their behaviour. The mass transferring of council housing over to these profit making RSL’s many of which are subsidiaries of larger RSL’s defies belief. One of the main reasons connected with the increase of these so called subsidiaries is because the large RSL’s have to create subsidiaries to try and kid the people into thinking that they are different new entities. They do this because they are hated within the communities that they have properties in.

What do RSL’s and Council Housing officers and regeneration administrators do that upsets residents so much? Bellow is a list of how these service providers oppress a community:

1. It is a known fact in the Liverpool Kensington New Deal for Communities NDC area that the RSL Community 7, which is a subsidiary of the hated Riverside Group, has given preference to NDC board members, in one case they gave the son of a Community 7 board member a two bed roomed totally refurbished house.
2. Deliberately ignore putting into place simple structures to address the issue of antisocial tenants. In many cases this procedure is practiced when they want to clear an area out so as to demolish large swathes of terraced houses and council houses so as to sell the land to large builders and property developers to build houses for sale.
3. Create divisions in the community
4. Using the communities’ negative perspectives such as parochial behaviour and short sightedness as tools to subjugate and divide the community with.
5. Putting structures into place to continually keep the community divided so that the City Council and RSL staff and all the other local government agencies they work with (who are in a minority group) can maintain their hegemonic position within the community.
6. Continually lying to the community.
7. Misuse of the present harassment laws.
8. Taking tenants who speak out to court under the Harassment laws.
9. Continually overemphasising phrases and words such as: None profit making, sustainable, community empowerment, social exclusion, community participation, so as to indoctrinate the community and the list could go on and on.
10. The large family syndrome: Using members of a large family within the community as a means to intimidate community members.
11. Turing homeowners against tenants.
12. Deliberately not putting democratic structures into place to stop inter area rivalry.
13. Deliberately putting structures into place to discourage community referendums in which the whole community has an opportunity to vote for a major project.
14. Keeping everything in house and away from the wider community.
15. Seeking the leaders within the community and buying those leaders off with offers of the new houses for rent or jobs.
16. Not informing the wider community about public meetings
17. Producing glossy community magazines, which give the reader an incorrect view of what, is happening within the community.
18. Ignoring critical dialogue and constantly trying to create a most favourable view of what they are doing for the community.
19. Putting structures into place to perpetuate the agendas of the dominant culture that exists at local government and civic society levels i.e. property developers, builders, estate agents, senior council officers and so on.
20. Stealing public land from under the noses of residents and selling that public land, with the full knowledge of the Housing Corporation, to wealthy builders to build houses for sale and not for rent on.
21. Not addressing the issue of the same old faces (people within the community who act as sub oppressors to the oppressor service providers. Normally about 30 people in a local government constituency) who are always present in every community.
22. Not putting structures into place to stop the same old faces from evolving into position of power within the community.

The above list could go on add-infinite.

As emancipated activists who believe in social justice we have a moral responsibility to educate the communities that we live in by highlighting the disgraceful corrupt behaviour of these careerist RSL and council housing officers. We have to continually devise new and innovative democratic ways of doing this. We must devise innovative ways of stopping the divisive behaviour of these service providers. We need to have meetings within the community and to organise the community as one body. We must recognise the fact that the service providers are continually trying to divide the community up into as many small groups as possible.

We must put structures into place to stop the service providers from telling the community what is best for the community and place the service providers into the position that they should be in and that is providing the service that the community wants. If we don't do this the service providers and the small groups of sub oppressors within the community will always be in a position of absolute power.