David Cameron's Assault on the Homeless

[devogue]

http://www.johannhari.com/2011/03/04/da ... e-homeless

"The day after his wife’s funeral, Steven Dent walked out of his house, “and I just kept walking,” he says. “I walked and walked. I never stopped. I couldn’t stand to look back, or to stop moving, ever again.” Now, four years later, he sleeps most nights under a bridge near Victoria Station, and spends his days on the streets or in the day-centres, trying not to think about her. He says he can still see her face, but everything else about his life back then is a blur. He remembers fighting in the Falklands, and Northern Ireland. He remembers some of his fellow squaddies, and wonders what became of them. But mostly he remembers the walking.

Conservative policies are about to hit Steven – and everyone like him – in three ways. They are shutting down great swathes of the hostels and mental health centres that currently give him his medication, look after him when he gets sick, and offer the only prospect he will ever have of getting back to a normal life. They are ensuring there will be, as the homeless charities put it, a “stratospheric rise” in the number of people sleeping in cardboard boxes alongside him, by slashing the rent subsidies that currently keep the poor in their homes. And they are about to make it a crime for you to give Steven a bowl of soup.

Earlier this week, the Tory-run Westminster Council, one of the richest in Britain, announced a ban on sleeping on the streets, or feeding anybody who does. They say giving Steven food only “encourages” him to be homeless. So on Tuesday night, I went on one of the soon-to-be-criminalized soup runs. I walked around the neon warrens of the West End – through the theatre-throngs, and past the fancy fashion stores – with two volunteers from the charity the Simon Community.

Cynthia Jameson and Mark Jones know by name all the homeless people they give soup, sandwiches and coffee to. They know their anxieties, their foibles, and their jokes. There’s Steven. There’s Greg, who believes he has discovered a cure for malaria, but the UN has stolen and destroyed it. There’s Andrew, shivering with heroin-withdrawal. There’s the Chinese man who can’t speak English but smiles with gratitude as he shovels five sugars into his tea. And, these days, there are new faces every time they come. Phil is a 27 year-old who has only been out on the streets for three weeks. “I worked in construction for twelve years, but this recession is so bad now there’s just no work,” he tells me. “I couldn’t pay my rent, so I got chucked out. I never thought this would happen to me. I’m so ashamed.” I tell him the Tory council believes he is “encouraged” here by the free food. He looks down at his sandwich and asks softly: “What planet are they on?”

Cynthia and I pause outside the Covent Garden Opera House. With the light reflecting in her eyes, she shakes her head and says: “How can they make it a crime to show kindness like this?”

Westminster Council is taking this action pre-emptively because they know that rough sleeping is about to sky-rocket as a direct result of David Cameron’s policies. To understand why, you have to go back a few decades. One of the symbols of Thatcher’s Britain was the Cardboard City that suddenly appeared in every town. But then they largely vanished. It wasn’t by accident. The last Labour government did some appalling things, but the homeless charities agree they had at least one remarkable achievement: they brought the number of rough sleepers crashing down by a startling 75 percent. Why? The specialists agree: Labour set up a dedicated Rough Sleepers Unit, and lavished money on it. Homeless shelters became well-staffed with professionals who had the time to listen, and the money to get homeless people the training and support they needed to start living a decent life again.

Now all that is being dismantled. David Cameron is slashing the money that is given to local councils, who have the legal responsibility to house the homeless – and the result is entirely predictable. Cornwall is slashing its spending on the homeless by 40 percent. Southwark is slashing it by 50 percent. Nottingham is slashing it by 70 percent. Across Britain, services for the homeless are closing. The ones that remain will have a skeleton staff, opening and shutting the hostel doors but not providing the long-term support that actually gets people off the streets. I couldn’t find a single person in the field who believes Cameron’s claim that volunteers will make up the difference – or even get a tenth of the way there.

This is being done at a time when the number of people needing those hostels and that support is set to sky-rocket. Some 90,000 single tenants and 82,000 families are facing eviction from their homes because of Housing Benefit cuts. Some will end up on friends’ sofas, or in emergency B&Bs. But a lot will end up on the streets. More and more people will be scrambling for fewer, feebler shelters – and all the Tories can think to do is try to ban people from feeding the victims. Their only hope is to turn our media into a Murdochracy, where the real news will be drowned out by an orgy of blaming the victims. Even people unmoved by basic human sympathy can surely see that all this is a recipe for a crime explosion.

James Cummings knows better than anyone what Cameron’s policies will mean. He was a manager in pubs and hotels all his life, but after his marriage broke down, he found himself glugging his way into severe alcoholism. He eventually lost his job in 2008 and ended up under a bridge in Elephant and Castle. He was found by a government outreach worker. She linked him up with a government-funded charity who took him in, got him a hostel bed, and got him training in IT. “Now I’ve got a good job and I’m paying taxes,” he tells me with justified pride, “but Cameron… is cutting to ribbons all the services that turned my life around. The hostel that took me in has closed now, and the charity that got me my training is facing huge cuts [in its grants].” So what would have happened if you had become homeless this year, in Cameron-Land? “I’d still be out there on the streets,” he says. In fact, it’s unlikely he would have lived to see this day: the average life expectancy for a homeless man is 42, and he is 50.

None of this is happening out of financial necessity. All of these cuts to services for the homeless could have been stopped if Cameron had moved one figure on a spreadsheet: if he had taken the £1bn in taxpayers’ money paid in bonuses to RBS bankers, and ringfenced it for the homeless instead.

At the end of the soup run, I watched Steven walk off into the darkness, trying once again to outpace his grief – and I glimpsed the skyline of the City of London glinting in the distance. The people in those towers caused this economic crisis. They crashed the global economy. But they are richer than ever, partying like it’s 1999 with our money – while the chance of Stephen getting a bed for the night, a bowl of soup in his stomach, or a path back to a normal life is being stripped away. Why is David Cameron punishing him for their crimes?"

[redunderthebed]

This is why i HATE conservatism a complete lack of sympathy or care for those of whom are down and out.


Glad you have haven't disappeared up david cameron arse and posting this dev truly sad.

[PsychoSerenity]

I don't know what to say to this. It's just fucked up.

[Feck]

Maybe Cameron is thinking that if this next winter is as bad as the last it will kill most of them off and the figures will look better ?

[devogue]

Many if not most homeless people are incredibly vulnerable and at risk. We can all argue the toss about benefits, welfare costs, the gap between rich and poor, the pros and cons of capitalism and socialism, and even about whether religion is a force for good or not, but we have a profound human duty to afford the most troubled and disenfranchised in our society the right to a safe bed at night, to shelter from the elements, to fucking christing food and sanitation, some hope, some glimmer of salvation from a hellish existence.

No doubt the likes of Cameron will defend themselves from accusations by saying it is local councils rather than central government that's cracking the whip, but they are clearly the ones who have made the decision easy for them, and they clearly don't care enough to push through legislation to prevent this monstrosity from happening. I thought Cameron might have learned something about care, compassion and vulnerability after the death of his disabled son, but he can obviously compartmentalise whatever humanity he has to turn the screw on the most needy in our society. His lack of empathy, and that of those around him, is terrifying.

[Seth]

Hm. Shelter workers say that people won't volunteer and charity won't pay the bills.

Does that make Cameron a dick, or does it make everybody in the UK who DOES have a home and a job selfish insensitive pricks, even by Marxist standards?

Or is it, as I predict, the socialist entitlement mentality at work here, the "it's not my job to take care of my fellow man, it's the government's" mentality proclaimed loudly even as the statement "taxes are too high" comes from the other side of the mouth?

Face it, the UK is bankrupt because of its socialist policies, and it's all coming apart because the OPM has run out. Oh, there's a little appearance of opulence left out there, with minor numbers of the bourgeoisie yet to be rounded-up, beaten and killed, and small pockets of cash or other assets yet to be raided, but it's not sustainable and after a few gasps ALL the OPM will be gone, And the UK has few natural resources to sustain things, and then the whole socialist nightmare will begin, and people will begin starving to death in their cardboard huts as the dependent class needs overwhelm the ability of the productive class to support them.

Welcome to Marxism, laddies.

[Feck]

[charlou]

Hm. Shelter workers say that people won't volunteer and charity won't pay the bills.

Does that make Cameron a dick, or does it make everybody in the UK who DOES have a home and a job selfish insensitive pricks, even by Marxist standards?

Or is it, as I predict, the socialist entitlement mentality at work here, the "it's not my job to take care of my fellow man, it's the government's" mentality proclaimed loudly even as the statement "taxes are too high" comes from the other side of the mouth?

Soup kitchens are run by charitable organisations/volunteers, not the government. Seems Cameron wants to make feeding the destitute illegal.

[Seth]

Hm. Shelter workers say that people won't volunteer and charity won't pay the bills.

Does that make Cameron a dick, or does it make everybody in the UK who DOES have a home and a job selfish insensitive pricks, even by Marxist standards?

Or is it, as I predict, the socialist entitlement mentality at work here, the "it's not my job to take care of my fellow man, it's the government's" mentality proclaimed loudly even as the statement "taxes are too high" comes from the other side of the mouth?

Soup kitchens are run by charitable organisations/volunteers, not the government.

Funny, the article says "government-funded charity," which is something of an oxymoron, don't you think, since nothing funded by government is ever the result of charity, it's the result of, in the end, naked force on the part of the government extracting money from the public.

But the point was that if private charity and volunteer help isn't enough to serve the needs of the homeless, as objectors to Cameron's plan claim, what does that say about the charitable instincts of Brits?

We know, for example, that Brits donate less than half per capita of what Americans do by way of charitable donations.

Time for Brits to step up and quit thinking it's someone else's job to care for their fellow man in need.

[Seth]

Hm. Shelter workers say that people won't volunteer and charity won't pay the bills.

Does that make Cameron a dick, or does it make everybody in the UK who DOES have a home and a job selfish insensitive pricks, even by Marxist standards?

Or is it, as I predict, the socialist entitlement mentality at work here, the "it's not my job to take care of my fellow man, it's the government's" mentality proclaimed loudly even as the statement "taxes are too high" comes from the other side of the mouth?

Soup kitchens are run by charitable organisations/volunteers, not the government. Seems Cameron wants to make feeding the destitute illegal.

And that is particularly despicable, and they've tried it here in the US as well, but it hasn't gone over very well here, and people feed the homeless anyway.

I suspect, however, that he's not trying to ban soup kitchens per se, I suspect he just doesn't want "unlicensed" persons distributing food to the homeless where they are camped out.

This was a concern here in the US in large part because they were concerned with the safety of the food being handed out by unlicensed individuals, which may not be prepared in sanitary kitchens.

Established charitable organizations have to comply with the health and safety laws for their kitchens, thereby ensuring that the food distributed is not unsafe.

There have been rare examples of homeless people being deliberately poisoned by malefactors handing out food, and I can see some wisdom in such rules, for the same reason that the government licenses and inspects mobile "roach coach" lunch wagons and street vendors.

I suspect it's about food safety, not harming the homeless, and I suspect you'd discover this if you bothered to look carefully at the situation rather than making knee-jerk judgments.

[devogue]

But the point was that if private charity and volunteer help isn't enough to serve the needs of the homeless, as objectors to Cameron's plan claim, what does that say about the charitable instincts of Brits?

It says that our government, which we see as the main agent for local social improvement and development ahead of charity (reflected in the higher taxes we pay), has decided to abandon the homeless.

Believe me, if David Cameron had stood for election with a manifest promise to pull the rug from under the most desperate people in society, if he had blatantly said that if a UK council decided to pass law whereby kindness to the homeless would be illegal he would stand by and allow that to happen, the fucker would be lucky to get 10% of the popular vote.

The British people are inherently decent; what's happening at the moment is incredibly savage and outrageous, and goes way beyond reconstructive economics.

[charlou]

I suspect it's about food safety, not harming the homeless, and I suspect you'd discover this if you bothered to look carefully at the situation rather than making knee-jerk judgments.

Bollocks.

I suspect it's about not encouraging a welfare mentality. It's an extreme measure that doesn't concede that there are all sorts of reasons why people can't take care of themselves ... and from what I gather, the governments own policies are becoming more and more a part of those reasons.

[Atheist-Lite]

I suspect it's about food safety, not harming the homeless, and I suspect you'd discover this if you bothered to look carefully at the situation rather than making knee-jerk judgments.

Bollocks.

I suspect it's about not encouraging a welfare mentality. It's an extreme measure that doesn't concede that there are all sorts of reasons why people can't take care of themselves ... and from what I gather, the governments own policies are becoming more and more a part of those reasons.

I suspect houseprices. Idealogy masks reality as always. A lot of people in rags wandering around a expensive area is going to damage prices and lots of people can't afford to live in the area (most of them own houses there).

[Warren Dew]

And that is particularly despicable, and they've tried it here in the US as well, but it hasn't gone over very well here, and people feed the homeless anyway.

I contribute to a homeless shelter, and I think usually charities targeted at the homeless generally try to provide them with a place to sleep as well as food. They would then not be in violation of a law like this, since the people would not be sleeping on the streets.

In fact, I suspect that this law is in part trying to encourage that. Charities in "one of the richest" places in Britain ought to be able to afford to provide a bed as well as food.

[Rum]

For clarity: 'Charities' are often partly government funded in the UK. The so called 'third sector' was encouraged by New Labour to pick up a lot of responsibility for a number of social areas normally associated with the State in rather more left leaning countries. Barnardos', Action for Children. the NSPCC and any number of 'charities' were encouraged to bid for large sums of government money (as well as encouraged to raise their own funds) to implement some of the government's policies.

Much of this funding is now being pulled and they are more likely to become self funding again to a great extent, though they anticipate a massive shortfall. The loss will be felt be the communities they have served over the last decade and which the Tories are leaving to their own devices..

Incidentally I have first hand experience of this as I have worked both with the NSPCC and Action for Children helping with bids and projects.

This issue is not a stand-alone ring fenced one as Dev suggests in my view. We do owe a duty as a society to the most vulnerable. But this is only one aspect of a massive disinvestment in social infrastructure. We have not really seen anything but the first symptoms of the impact of this in my view.