The charity Crisis says that 12,300 people are sleeping rough on the streets this Christmas – (official government figure 4,751) – and in addition 12,000 people will spend the night in tents, cars, sheds, bins or night buses.
Hundreds of people have raised more than £9,000 to come to the rescue and house 28 homeless people in Hull over Christmas after their charity booking was revoked by a leading hotel chain. But the truth is that nobody should be homeless, and nobody should have to rely for Christmas, or any other time, on the whim of a hotel chain weighing up whether it would be better for its reputation and profit margins to go with the homeless or play safe and reject them. The choice Britannia group made was likely to be, according to a homelessness worker, because of “fear that [the homeless] are drunk ex-servicemen on drugs, rather than being on short-term contracts or suffering problems with welfare”.
So a general election then. We need a government that will focus on people’s needs. Forget the parliamentary panto. We need home-grown Yellow Vests, a Labour government, and then continued action to hold that government to account so that, amongst other things, it brings the unnecessary scar of homelessness to an end.
Bob Mouncer's blog 