19 July 2014

By Mustaqim Sahib Bleher

There is a quiet revolution brewing in England. For years, banks, having defrauded the public through bailouts, also have defrauded ordinary people of their lives' savings by repossessing their homes under various pretences. But now, people are fighting back.

Tom Crawford's case in Nottingham is one which has brought a lot of this to the fore. In a desperate YouTube message he asked for help when he discovered that after having paid off his mortgage for a quarter of a century he did not own a penny in his home because the building society had, without his knowledge, converted the mortgage from an endowment mortgage to an interest only product. And now they wanted him out of the home where he brought up his children and at a time when he was looking forward to retirement after having just recovered from cancer. To his shock he also discovered that there almost 250 such repossession actions a week going through the court in his medium-sized home town of Nottingham alone.

Nottingham, of course, is known to most people for the story of Robin Hood who with his "merry men" fought the injustice of an oppressive tax collecting regime. Today it is not royalty who extract the last pound of flesh from hard-working citizens, but the banking system, with courts and governments at their knees to assist them. And a new band of merry men and women has emerged who travel the country to stop bailiffs from taking possession of homes and also assist those threatened with eviction in fighting the banks in court, using every legal loophole available and, increasingly, challenging the courts themselves under common law.

Although the bailiffs were due to arrive early in the morning, people travelled from all over the country, as far as Scotland hundreds of miles away even to send a clear message to the banks and building societies, courts and local governments, and their bailiff stooges that enough is enough. The usually quiet cul-de-sac in which Tom lives was filled with about 250 people united by having made the journey purely to support Tom in his plight and prevent the bailiff from getting anywhere near his property.

The police are usually on the side of the oppressor, but faced with large crowds they only drove past a number of times in a riot van to assess the situation, and the bailiff never turned up, scared of a public show-down. Some of the supporters left after mid-day, but many stayed on until the evening, just in case the bailiff would still try to force entry.

A lot has been written about the victims of the banking crisis, but here people had begun to fight back, using alternative media as the means to communicate and spread the message, and succeeded in preventing an eviction.

©  EsinIslam.Com

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