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Liverpool Indymedia

Liverpool Activist’s Car Petrol Bombed

Mike Lane | 26.01.2005 12:54 | Liverpool | London

Activist campaigning against possible regeneration corruption in Merseyside and against the £62m Liverpool Kensington New Deal for Communities initiative is stopped by people claiming to be policemen and latter has his car petrol bombed.

A couple of years after this NDC project started in the Liverpool Kensington area they put several cameras on 30 foot posts in strategic positions in and around the this NDC area. One of these cameras is right in the middle of my road. The camera in my road has been broken for months. A week before my car was petrol bombed I was stopped in my car just around the corner from where I live by what I thought was a police car. The road that I was stopped on runs off the centre of the road that I live on. The camera that has been broken ever since it was installed a year or so ago automatically turns to a central position which looks from my road directly up the road that I was stopped on. The car that stopped me was a dark maroon people carrier with dark windows on the sides. The car had blue flashing strip lights on its grill just like the lights that the police have on their undercover police cars. Apparently the CID and undercover cops use these people carriers. Anyway, as I turned the corner this car came behind me and flashed these blue lights. I automatically thought to myself, what’s going on here? Taking into account the fact that the crime in this NDC area is now out of control, even though we have community wardens and six NDC policemen who are constantly telling the local press that everything in the area is wonderful and there has been a massive drop in crime since they were introduced to the area, I got out of my car.

This young guy of about 25 dressed in black casual cloths, gets out of this ominous dark people carrier and shouts, police! Having done three years training in the martial arts (Uechiryu Karate) I automatically sensed something was wrong. I’m a big guy, six foot 1 inch and 18 stone in weight. The guy who got out of the car claiming to be a cop is only of average build and straight away I notice he is wary of me, even though there are other guys in the car, he is scared and this fear reflected itself in the tone of his voice. You are trained in the martial arts that when a possible life-threatening situation like this takes place you must take the initiative to avoid violence. Now this is all happening in seconds and the guy who has no martial arts training is always 2 or 3 seconds behind the martial artist when it comes to taking the initiative. The Karate style Uechiyu is a Kungfoo style of Karate and the style put great emphasis on awareness. I instantly sussed out something was wrong and I was back in my car pressing the locking lever with my arm. The guy who claims to be a policeman comes to the door and shouts get out! But I told him get lost. Next thing a car comes down the road and stops on the other side, I drives over to it and shouted from my car window, alright mate, I think these guys are trying to have me off. Next thing the people carrier is off like a shot. Looking back in retrospect, I know I should not have done this, but I felt something really sinister was going on so I chases after this car, but the young guy who is driving it is a really good driver and they soon lose me, but I managed to get half of the registration number. Like the good little citizen I goes to the local cop station still thinking these guys could be cops and the reason they drove of suddenly was because they were called to an emergency, but I had my doubts.

The policeman on the complaints desk in the police station went into the office and comes back after 10 mins and told me that there was an undercover car with those letters on working in the community. I asked him why it had stopped me a local resident? The desk policeman, who is the typical stereo type snotty shut your mouth or I'll arrest you type policeman told me he was busy and their was nothing he could do.

The police in this police station are supposed to be working closely with the six NDC community policemen, who in turn are in with the ten NDC wardens. The ten NDC warden’s work for the new housing association Community 7, who are in reality a subsidiary of the most hated housing association on Merseyside "Riverside Housing." Riverside has 22,000 properties on Merseyside and has its sticky fingers into anything that can make money. This ruthless housing association is trying to get it's hands on as much regeneration money as it can and just like all the other housing associations throughout the country it treats its tenants like dirt.

I am not saying the wardens are useless, what I am saying is these wardens should not be under the control of a housing association they should be under the control of the city council even though the city council officers are just as bad as the housing association housing officers and they are all in cahoots with each other. We all know how undemocratic these housing associations are and how they are in reality an oppressive force within poor working class communities. These people hide behind the fact that they are charitable organisations and they use this to hoodwink residents. These housing association’s pull every stroke in the book in their efforts to self perpetuate their existence. They say that they sell their houses to their tenants, but they don’t and even the few that they do sell they sell with practically no discount. Yet Council tenants enjoy a 25% to 50% discount, but as we all know most of the council houses are being transferred over to the money grabbing self-perpetuating housing associations now known as Registered Social Landlords. Have you ever wondered why, if the council can give these houses, which are publicly owned house (this means the tenants who live in them own them) to RSL for practically nothing, why can’t they give them to the tenants who in many cases have paid for them three times over in rent? The reason they don’t is because central government knows that the RSL’s are an oppressive force within the community and as such they keep their tenants subjugated and passive. Central government wants us all to be passive and compliant, heaven forbid that the community should have any power. This is why these incompetent council officers and housing association officers are paid so much money for doing practically nothing and making a mess of everything they touch. Their main purpose is to keep their tenants in check and they also use the police and the courts to do this. Up and down the country RSL’s are dragging voicefull tenants through the courts under the harassment laws trying to get ASBOS put onto them to silence them. My housing association has already tried that one on me but I was too clever and the judge went against them and as such they had to pay all the court costs. The harassment laws where upgraded by Jack Straw when he was the home secretary and made even moor draconian. The trouble with this ASBO law, which stems from the Harassment Laws, is it can also be used by oppressive local government civil servants such as council officers and other service providers such as RSL housing officers to silence dissidents and people who are excising their rights to freedom of speech.

The senior service providers have always been good when it come to covert oppression of poor working class communities, they even brain wash our kids in school. The government does not want our children to be emancipated and empowered, they want our kids to be complaint subservient citizens, not free thinking emancipated citizens who create and shape the world to what they want, but rather citizens who comply and adapt to a world that is being imposed upon them, this is why kids from socially deprived communities rebel at school, they know they are being oppressed.

The community activists who comply with these regeneration administrators think that they are doing the right thing and that emancipated people like me are crazy. Never once do they ever question the fact that NDC administrators, council officers and Government Office civil servants and all the agencies and consultants that work for them are in effect imposing their agendas onto the community, agendas that are advantageous to outside vested interests. These well meaning NDC residents just think that what is happening is normal. But when the NDC money has gone and they see that their community has been decimated they realise that they have been taken for a ride, but it’s too late.

Any way getting back to the storey of the mysterious petrol bombing of my car. The day after I was stopped by these guys who claimed they were policemen I was walking to my car in a pert of the NDC area known as Edge Hill when all of a sudden I sees this car coming down the road at about 70 miles per hour. The car skidded around a corner and four guys jump out of it and run right past me towards a main road. I instantly regognised one of these guys as the guy that had stopped me the night before. Now these guys don’t look like criminals, they look like cops; I mean one of them is in his early thirties. I looked around the corner and the car that they jumped out of, which had mounted the kerb, was the car that had stopped me the night before it even had the three letters I had given to the cops on its number plate. The police come and look at the car and the cop disappears claiming there is nothing he can do. A couple of hours latter this cop telephoned me a told me that the car had been chased by the police based on the information I had given them the night before, but the car had given the police the slip. I said if that is the case why did you not take the car away. The cop says that they couldn’t. I drive back there later and the car is gone. Now all the time I am still convinced that this car is an undercover cop car and that something sinister is going on. Anyway the following Sunday I heard a smashing sound, looked out of my window and saw I hooded figure throwing a petrol bomb into my car.

It is not just me that witnesses this but other people in the road saw it happen but are too scared to speak to the cops about it.

God knows what is going to happen now? This has up to now cost me at least a £1,000 in lost earnings and messing about inconvenience. The insurance people reckon it will take at least a couple of months to pay me out for my car, which was a dam good car, and I have had to get an overdraft from my bank to buy another car, which is nowhere near as good as the car that got burnt out. I don’t trust the police either. The cops in this city, as well as being sinister, are very corrupt and they care absolutely nothing about what happens to people like me who live in poor socially deprived communities. Would I identify these guys if the cops caught them? You must be jokeing! In the community were I live you have to live by the analogy, I saw nothing, I heard nothing and I know nothing!



Mike Lane
- e-mail: mickjlane@btinternet.com
- Homepage: http://www.tenantsactiongroup.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Comments

Display the following 9 comments

  1. Watch your back Mick — Random
  2. Its really sinister! — Mike Lane
  3. could be masons? — JJ
  4. (Please use a unique and meaningful title) — your name
  5. What next? — Random
  6. The local media don't want to know! — Mike Lane
  7. We have media — your name
  8. kung fu action — anarchkit
  9. landlord thugs — pp

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