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Tag Archives: homelessness
Hypocrisy unlimited – and unashamed
The Guardian report below is about people sleeping in bins. The government has made a promise about it, what it calls a “commitment”. Here it is:
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “It is completely unacceptable that anyone should have to face sleeping in these conditions in modern Britain. This does not reflect the society we should be and this is why we have committed to ending rough sleeping by the end of this parliament.”
Anyone who has followed government promises for any length of time knows this promise will not be kept. We know the government has no intention of keeping it. The government is laughing at the homeless and at us. This ranks as one of the most cynical statements ever to be spewed from the mouth of any government lackey. As for the Secretary of State, words fail me … I wonder if Dickens could ever have thought, in the 19th century, that Scrooge would still be alive and well and stalking the corridors of Whitehall in the 21st century. If the poor would rather die, said Scrooge, “let them do it, and reduce the surplus population.” We mustn’t kid ourselves: this is how the government today thinks about the poor, the homeless, the sick, the elderly, the disabled.
Send James out, they’ll believe him – he’s got a lovely smile
The rise in homelessness, according to housing secretary James Brokenshire, is not the result of government policies.
Yes it is.
I’m getting very tired of Brokenshire’s complacent face as he defends the indefensible. He knows the facts. He and his miserable government are responsible for them. Now another homeless person has died outside the “mother of parliaments”.
How can we end this nightmare? A general election would be a start.
A solution not just for Christmas
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more than £9,000 to come to the rescue and house 28 homeless people in Hull over Christmas after their charity booking was revoked by a leading hotel chain.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.
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