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Ted Moat - a moral fraud

Ted Moat lived next door to Fareshares, and until he moved to Bradford on Avon two months ago the water, electricity and gas came from his flat.

I have been homeless for about 3 years, and have stayed in his flat during several extended periods over that time. It was kind of him to put me up but he did cause a lot of trouble in my life, and destroy a lot of what I was doing.

He has left copies of what claims to be a history of the relationship between Fareshares and the Infoshop, entitled "The Brave Little Cornershop and the Bright Tomorrow" in Fareshares, which is a pack of lies and innuendo. He did as much as he could to poison that relationship, for his own devious and extremely unpleasant agenda.

I don't know what the situation is now, but at one time a lot of stock was going missing from Fareshares. Rightly or wrongly, Sylvie, Sonia and Clare thought that it was going missing out of shop hours because too many people (including the Infoshop people) had keys to Fareshares. They therefore wanted to change the locks and seal off the Infoshop from Fareshares when Fareshares was closed. They enlisted Ted's help to do this. I had been staying at Ted's for a short period before that and took at face value what he told me about it. Although I didn't know the people in the Infoshop well, I liked them, which doesn't mean that someone connected with them wasn't nicking stuff. However Clare assured me that changing the locks was in no way directed against the Infoshop - it was necessary to restrict access outside opening times. I even defended this (and I have to say, was instrumental in pushing it through) at a meeting.

Ted (very typically) fucked off for a few days and left me to be a sort of enforcer of the locking up procedure - a position I should never have let myself be put in, because I wasn't really part of Fareshares, as Jen quite rightly pointed out to me at the time.

However, from comments he made before he left, I gradually started to realise that Ted had a whole hidden agenda of absolute hatred of the Infoshop and the most extreme homophobia I have ever come across. In particular he had someone called Vaz ("the man who (Ted) refuses to name") in the frame for nicking Fareshares stock. Now I don't know Vaz so I can say nothing about him - what I can say is that about the only 'evidence' Ted had against Vaz was that "homosexuality is a mark of a man's character" - Vaz is gay. He repeated this statement over and over again both to myself and to Clarem who was as shocked by it as I was. The only only other 'evidence' against Vaz was that he argued against me at the meeting about changing the locks - a rather unlikely thing for him to do if he was the thief.

I have had many rows with Ted about this since - on one occasion he launched into the most amazing tirade - penises and excrament and who knows what - it was scatalogical. Next day, in the course of an 'apology' he told me that his preferred word for homosexual was pervert. A couple of people have wondered aloud to me about all this - if he can be secure in his own sexual identity - 'he doth protest too much'.

On to 'anarchism'. Now I have strong anarchist sympathies, but having been part of anarchist communities I can be pretty cynical about anarchism. I also value a diversity of views and am always interested in people with views opposed to my own - anarchists can be mindblowingly boring. So when I first heard Ted going on about the anarchists in the Infoshop I didn't think it was ideological - I thought he just didn't like those particular anarchists. I gradually realised that I was mistaken, and that Ted regarded himself as on a moral crusade against perversion and immorality which the bookshop represented. I should say at this point, if you hadn't already guessed, that Ted is a pretty fanatic Christian, and tends to justify a lot of his reactionary views in biblical terms. He describes himself as a heretic, but I've yet to work out what the heresy is - his views seemed pretty conventional to me. This, like calling himself a hippy, is an example of Tedspeak - using words with a commonly accepted meaning but meaning something completely different by them. How many hippies do you know who have a veneration for the police and law and order verging on worship, cannot tolerate any criticism of the status quo, obsessed with the work ethic, extremely homophobic etc.

Perhaps, despite what I've said, I sound intolerant. What angered me about Ted is not (with the exception of the homophobia) his political views - it was the way he disguised them and tried to present an image of himself completely at variance with the truth. Now to a certain extent we all do this to fit in and be accepted and it is to some extent excusable.

However Ted calimed to be a good old hippy representing the good old Pullens against the forces of darkness in the Infoshop. That's a lie. I knew some of the original Pullens squatters, including the ex chair of the Tennants Association, Dave O'Neill. His politics were very similar to the Infoshop's. I also knew Martin Oddsocks, who set up Fareshares. He was an anarchist - most of the squatters were anarchists.

I realised that Ted could never really have been part of that community because if he had been he would have known how niave his views sounded and how offensive they were - people would have told them. Even if he had kept to roughly the same views, he would have at least put them in a more sophisticated and less insensitive way.

I don't normally go on about my political views, but simply because Ted was making so many ludicrous assertions and coming out with so much prejudice, I tried to educate him a bit. However I soon found out that he didn't want to read or to hear anything that challenged the status quo, however gently. You would get the 'does not compute' sign and he would talk over you or try to change the subject.

Another bee he had in his bonnet about the bookshop - more 'evidence' was that people in the Infoshop supported shoplifting in big supermarkets. What struck me as ironic about this is that his own father, who was an economist and civil servant, has (to me) a responsiblity for a predictable explosion of crime in this country. This is because he was the civil servant responsible for smashing the Miners Strike, and thence the Trade Union Movement as a whole. The state hates strong, independent communities like the mining communities because they have the moral strength to resist capitalism - when they are smashed and society is atomised into isolated individuals in a low wage economy, crime explodes, which suits the state, because trust is broken, and people are weak and divided. As a result of people like Ted's father, we haven't had an effective opposition to capitalism for a long time, and given the low wages and the torture machine of the benefits system, most people in working class areas have been forced into breaking the law in one way or another. I am not trying to hold Ted responsible for the crimes of his father, but it is hypocritical to attack people at the bottom for crimes that the system deliberately drives people to in order to keep their heads above water, and ignore the much greater crimes of big business and the state - Ted was (conveniently) travelling in Europe at the time of the Miners Strike, but he supported the government's stance and seems to dislike trade unions. He is evasive on this subject, as on many.

The way of life of Western societies is based on war, exploitation, oppression, in the Third World, an immense mass-murder machine on a global scale. Writers like John Pilger have described the secret war the West carries on against the Third World, whether by covert operations against countries or movements they are opposed to, support for tyrants, or the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and IMF. Ted never wanted to hear about that. Society is not under threat from global capitalism but from gay anarchist shoplifters.

I have mentioned Ted's reverence for the police. I gradually became aware that he had frequent contacts with them and that they often came to visit him. Given the fact that the police love to build up information about politically active individuals and given his hatred of 'subversives' I don't doubt that he was giving the police a lot of information about people - towards the end I felt like I was living with an informer for the East German Stasi.

On the last evening I spent with him he felt he had nothing to lose, and he told Amos and myself that he was thinking of joining the Countryside Alliance and that they had the right to break the law to protect their interests - rather a new position for him. He also told us that he wanted to get a 'bow of yew' to shoot foxes, and about some Belgian cartoons he liked, which showed how anything fine or decent would be corrupted or destroyed if the 'riff-raff' (favorite Ted term) took over.

I said that Ted put me up, and it was kind of him to do so - despite the tensions between us, I was buying food and cooking for Ted, as well as cleaning the flat during this period, because he had some kind of repetive strain injury in his wrists and couldn't use his hands. At the end, when he was moving to Bradford-on-Avon, he wept various crocodile tears about making me homeless and said told me he would make efforts to transfer the flat to me. To be honest, I didn't want to be beholden to Ted after what I had seen, but I didn't object to it. However he simply abandoned it without telling me, and then led Brendan up a similar garden path, sabotaging a transfer at the end - Brendan was devastated by it. At the end, two members of the Pullens community (one of whom was a friend of Ted's) approached me and said that it was crazy about me being made homeless in this way and that whatever Ted did I should squat the flat. Ted didn't want me to do this because he said he was worried about being liable for rent. I went to discuss it with a close friend of Ted, Pete Green. He advised me against it - then two days later, after I had left, Ted let another friend of his, who he had decided was ideologically sound, squat the flat. (He had previously gone through all this subterfuge about changing the locks in case I had kept a key.) I discovered this because Pete Green casually mentioned that he had moved this person in after telling me about Ted's leaving party - despite advising me not to squat the place because Ted said he was worried about liability, he wasn't at all concerned about Ted stabbing me in the back.

Let me finish by telling how the lock changing episode ended for me personally. After a couple of days of this 'enforcer' role, I realised that contrary to what I'd been led to believe, most of the Fareshares workers didn't support the changing of the locks, and I felt completely morally compromised. I really didn't want to stay at Ted's any longer, so despite the fact that I was ill, it was pouring rain and I had no money (I wasn't claiming benefits at the time) I walked with my rucksack to a friend's flat in Tower Hamlets, and next day to a friend's in Hackney. As a result of that walk (I was using an inhaler every half mile) I ended up in Homerton Hospital with the worst asthma attack of my life.

One thing I can be grateful to Ted for is in giving me an object lesson in the deviousness and hypocrisy of the middle class - that those people who go on about law and order will only do so when its in their interest - it's dropped like a stone when its no longer convenient, and how they will smile in your face and then stab you in the back. But all in all, I prefer the old punk saying "never trust a hippy".