Under the new proposals, people using a continuous cruising licence would not be allowed to spend more than 61 days in a year in each of six designated neighbourhoods across 40 miles of canal network, and they would be forced to move to a different neighbourhood every 14 days.
The canal boat residents fear they will be forced from the river if the proposals go ahead as drafted. Alice Wellbeloved, a freelance fashion designer, who has lived on the Lea for almost five years with her partner and baby, said the plan meant it was no longer feasible to live the family life they had built together. "For us it would be disastrous," she said. "We have a 10-month-old baby, and these proposals mean we could not work or get the childcare we need. We cannot afford to buy a new house. We feel we are being uprooted from our community."There is a page against the proposals here.
Regulatory capture. The Olympics started as a nonprofit public good, and are statutorily enshrined as such, but somewhere along the line, they were captured by corporate sponsors, who subsequently used them to expropriate land, get laws passed suspending inconvenient civil liberties, and get away with things that are usually hard to do in non-totalitarian countries.
Questions to ask London's rulers: "Why do this? What purpose does it serve to clean social reality away from an area while the Olympics are on? Do host cities really think it fools outsiders about the standard of living there, particularly when the cleansing actions inevitably become international news stories? Don't you think tourists might actually want to see what life is really like in a city they visit?"
And this just seems ludicrous: "high demand for visitor moorings during the 2012 Olympics" - how many visitors to the Olympics are likely to travel there by canal?