Gentrification of all inner city areas is the name of their game!

It is now three years since I was nearly kidnapped or mugged by a large criminal family that lived and still lives in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool, a giant regeneration gentrification area. You stalwarts who still bother to log onto Indymedia will probably remember the postings that I put onto the site three years ago about this incident.

Looking back in retrospect, I am convinced that these animals were going to kidnap me and probably murder me. Three years I'd been posting leaflets called The Whistleblower, a leaflet designed to try and inform the so-called regeneration community about how the council, with the help of Liverpool's media i.e. the Liverpool Echo, Radio Merseyside’s Roger Phillips and all the other civic agencies, were lying to them about regenerating their community when in reality they were going to boot most of the residents, especially the poor socially deprived ones, out of the area altogether into prepared ghettos in other parts of Merseyside miles away from the inner and city-centre areas.

You know, I have met homeowners whose houses are now boarded up, who were shunted to the top of housing association lists above the homeless who were on those same housing association lists and are still on them. Yes, they gave these homeowners £40,000 to £60,000 for their houses (and let's not forget the lying government's 4,000 relocation fee) and then to further encourage them to leave they gave them the keys to the best social housing possible when there are thousands of poor people rotting in shitty £125 per week rented private-landlord properties and temporary housing.

After spending a year running the gauntlet of intimidation and threats and my car being petrol bombed outside my flat by members of this criminal family and their criminal friends, I was eventually moved right out of the area by my housing association for my own safety. Oh, I forgot to mention, I had to park my replacement car over a mile away for the period until I left, in case these animals blew that up too.

What did the hundreds of thousands of Whistleblower leaflets and SLP political leaflets I posted in the area achieve or amount to? Yes you guessed right. The whole five-year project, if that’s the right word to describe it, never amounted to a hill of fucking beans. And the irony of all this is, in the very close where I now live on a poverty stricken housing association estate built right out in the sticks, only four doors up from me is a demolition homeowner who got £60,000 for his house and was given the keys to a bungalow. The other day he told me that he drinks himself to sleep at night with a bottle of whisky because he can’t stand the anti-social kids who live in the houses that surround his bungalow. I don’t experience the same hassle as him because my rented property is in a part of the close where the kids don’t hang around. Lucky me!

I live in a tiny bungalow and, as a result of the attempted kidnapping and intimidation I experienced in Edge Hill, I have made my tiny rented bungalow in this new poverty-stricken area into a prison, not a prison that you can’t escape from, but rather a fortress that you can’t get into. Steel bars on the front door and back windows, an alarm system that is activated even of a night and locks on all the inner doors that I religiously lock every night before I go to bed. I have a machete and a commando knife at my side right through the evening and when I am in bed.

After twelve months of living here I had a massive heart attack and nearly died, fuck it, I don’t know if what happened to me helped bring this about, but there is no history of heart problems in my family.

Fuck it man, I’m really pissed off at the moment, fifty-three years old and totally disillusioned with direct activism. The state are bastards. Central and local government are very devious and clever, they just put certain structures into place within communities that cause an evolutionary process that favours them. Fuck me, these bastards can do whatever they like with people. Social engineering! It’s really fucking scary.

Oh, just a final observation. You probably know about the Lady Elizabeth Pasco? They call her the Edge Lane woman. The woman who has stopped the Liverpool City Council from demolishing 2,000 houses in the Edge Hill area twice in the High Court. Do you think she will win? She won’t, you know. They will leave her house, demolish all the others and build loads of luxury flats around hers, it will be like piggy in the middle. They’ve done it before. Want proof of this? Next time you pass the back of the Royal Hospital take a look at the old solitary house within the hospital grounds. The old guy who lives there stopped the council from demolishing his house years ago. His house was just one of 200 that used to be in a street in the area before the hospital was built.

All the best, Mike lane

Mike Lane e-mail: mickjlane [AT] btinternet.com