(Taken from Facebook invite)

8th August, 14:00 – 16:30

Hello Everyone,
As many of you will be aware, the government has now released the consultation paper ‘Options for Dealing with Squatters’. SQUASH (Squatter’s Action for Secure Homes) has been busy campaigning and raising awareness in opposition to these proposals to criminalise squatting. We have already released the briefing ‘Criminalising the Vulnerable: why we can’t criminalise our way out of a housing crisis’ and are currently working towards a more in depth response, exploring the wider implications of the government’s proposals. We want to now invite you to our next strategy meeting at 2pm on Monday 8th August, in the Roebuck Pub in Borough.

The proposed legislation would have implications for different groups across society. The legislation would seriously infringe tenants rights; it would undermine student and worker occupations and affect our general rights to protest; it would have ramifications for the development of arts and culture in a time of austerity; it would further victimise Gypsy and Traveller groups; and not least, exacerbate an already critical housing crisis and effectively criminalise the already vulnerable. We need to recognise our common ground and challenge the proposed legislation from all angles. Many of you have already attended our public meetings and are developing your strategies for dealing with the consultation. For those of you who haven’t, we urge you to consider taking these steps and would like to invite you to join us in challenging the proposed criminalisation of squatting.

We propose to meet up to share strategies, ideas, pool our resources and develop a broad way forward. The plan is to have a spokes meeting of the key groups dealing with the issues impacted by the consultation. Not a public meeting as we want to get down to the nitty gritty. This would therefore be invite only but please do pass the invite onto any key groups that should be involved but haven’t been yet. Ideally each group would send at least one spoke to the meeting to feed in their organisations approach.

We propose to meet on the following date as some groups have said that they are free:

Monday 8th of August
2.00pm – 4.30pm

upstairs in The Roebuck Pub (Borough)
50 Great Dover Street SE1 4YG
http://theroebuck.net/home​.html

Please do try to attend. If you can’t then try to send another person or let us know a time during the same week that you could make. For now we’ll stick to the above date and time.

Please RSVP to say whether you are coming or not and who we should expect so we can start on time.

All the best,

SQUASH
www.squashcampaign.org