It is with great delight that we hear at long last the notorious high-rise flats in Everton Brow, Landmark and Inn in the Park that housed hundreds of Refugees and Asylum Seekers has, after campaigns, hunger strikes, endless evidence and complaints, been forced to close. Sadly the monsters who made £milions out of it have not gone away, they will still continue to force refugees and asylum seekers into damp, dangerous conditions. The Property owned by a moneygrabber called Feligh Sabbagh and calling her company 'Liverpool Landmark' (Not to be mistaken with Landmark PLC or Landmark Ltd which is a completely separate company) has been funded by the Home office and will continue to be funded by them. The evidence to close the blocks has been sitting in the hands of the local council and the Home office for a couple of years but they refused to act on it. The local council and those people who were supposed to be working for the benefit of refugees - refused to do anything, and even attempted to discredit the work PNP had been doing around the site.
We have always believed in self-organisation, and this is what we encouraged the refugees at the tower blocks to do. We have and will encourage others to be suspicious of anyone who steps in and says they want to represent you - the refugees at the tower blocks and many others have this continually happen. This creates inactivity on the parts of those who can really force really change - i.e. themselves, organising together.
Everyone from the council to the local MP let them down, and eventually it took a fire in the top floor of the flats to force, after forceful messages from both the fire brigade and Merseyside police, the home office to act. We can be thankful that nobody during that period was killed, that was only through sheer luck. People Not Profit do not claim to represent anyone except themselves, we believe in autonomy and self-organisation of all excluded and repressed groups, and we will support that in anyway we can, by agitating and trying to use the skills we have to educate. These monster type landlords (not only Liverpool Landmark) are making a fortune out of refugees, and they must be stopped - but the only way this will happen like the only way we will build a world where people come first and not profit is by those who are at the brunt of this crazy economic nightmare, organising themselves and fighting back.

ACCOUNT OF ONE PERSON'S EXPERIENCE WITH LIVERPOOL LANDMARK:
The two tower blocks in Everton Brow, Liverpool, now known as Landmark and Inn on the Park would smack you in the face as soon as you could take them in properly within their setting. Ugly and isolated surrounded by grimy wasteground they lie roughly in an area that was targeted by the Militant Labour council of the 80s as part of their new housing policy. The council at that time basically built as much new housing as possible until they were told this was against the law, and from that point onwards only minor patching up jobs were allowed. If you walk around Everton there is now a small oasis of decent housing that accentuates the unacceptable housing around it. These particular tower blocks have become the most sickening part of this political logic. They should have been knocked down in the 80s, valued by the council at 10p a flat, they were abandoned and condemned but it was considered too costly to knock them down, let alone rebuild. They were sold to a private company at a pittance to use as they saw fit. A group called Liverpool Landmark saw an opportunity, but whether they knew just how lucky they were going to get remains a mystery. In fact finding out exactly why it was decided to lease out a contract to this company in this particular situation to house refugees is like trying to find out a state secret.
My own involvement has taught me so much about British authority and its attitudes, it has taken me way beyond areas of inherent racism and into what appears a cynical policy of scapegoating, that outlaws anyone unwilling to accept that people cannot be treated with respect.
Liverpool Landmark are now Government sponsored heavies, if I use the term gangsters it is not a loose analogy. They employ refugees within the tower blocks to violently intimidate the mainly Kurdish residents and local residents are employed to watch out over people coming and going, refugees or not. There is a complete disregard for anyone's well being within the blocks, letters are opened, official messages destroyed, while safety within the actual buildings themselves is casually disregarded with lifts turned off and repairs never done. This is not speculation, it is documented, the Landlords attitude to their tenants is actually televised. Liverpool Landmark receive £105 per week for every refugee, generating an income of £3m.
Our attempts to support the residents of Landmark started with a considered approach based on the fractious situation in the area. We approached community groups in the area, who were shocked that no official body had contacted them about the racial tension surrounding the blocks. We continued, encouraged by Refugee support networks to do second rate unpaid social work, but received little support from the tenants of Landmarks themselves for this approach. When we visited and talked of long term strategies of integration, we were faced with desperation and anger, people were fearful of their safety, not just from misplaced resentment within Everton but from the owners of the tower blocks themselves.
We reluctantly agreed to help with a demonstration in the city centre, that many people felt could cause a backlash. That attitude now feels extremely patronising and I now wish we had taken our lead completely from the sense of anger and will within the tower blocks. The demonstration attracted media and political attention and only minor racist outbursts, if you ignore the attitudes of senior police officers.
It ended up with meetings between residents' committee from the tower blocks and senior officials from the council. We were invited to attend these meetings, and beyond the political smarm it did seem that the council had been shamed into action. NASS were contacted and knew of Landmark's activities. It would take time but progress appeared to be taken.
The next stage proved again that despite all I'd seen I was still underestimating the firmer grasp that the residents of Landmark had on what was really going on. They had heard every promise on the planet and now they were prepared to starve themselves to make their point. Having friends willing to kill themselves to change attitudes, put the whole thing into horrible perspective. The hunger strike finished with more promises from NASS and Louise Elman, but deadlines came and went with no action taken and no reason given why, eventually those involved were shipped off to Sunderland, an area where Landmark has further property, with the admonishment of those who had promised solutions. Every official refugee supposed support organisation appeared to be part of a conspiracy to block change. We found ourselves facing barely guarded accusations of using refugees, laughable really when I consider our original compliance. Any real change has taken place through the refugees determination, however, we are still now sitting through meetings listening to council officials and members of refugee action talking of other groups encouraging them to act irresponsibly and of the difficulties involved in challenging this company, that they openly admit are behaving with no consideration for human life.