scrooge with a little added pecksniff

Here’s festive:

As charities launch their annual drive to help the homeless at Christmas, Westminster Council in central London is pursuing plans to ban soup kitchens from its streets...

The founder of the Big Issue magazine John Bird, who spent years living rough, also believes that soup runs keep people on the streets.

"We wouldn't want to feed our dogs on the streets. There would be an outcry if there was a law that came out tomorrow, saying everyone had to feed their dogs on the streets. But we feed our homeless people on the streets. It is barbaric."

There’s no law making it compulsory to feed people on the streets. And if there ever was a law which made it illegal to feed dogs on the street, people would wonder what the hell all that was about. So what the hell is it about?

A government drive to reduce homelessness has helped bring down the numbers sleeping rough by around two thirds...

Well, no. People on the streets are only counted as sleepers if they’re “clearly bedded down in the open” - rather than dossing down in a derelict building, say - only if they happen to be horizontal when the survey team meets them and only in city centres. Also:

“The count teams are advised to stay away from anywhere they feel to be risky – but it’s exactly those places where homeless people are most likely to be. Every aspect of the guidelines is a way of not counting. In fact I’m amazed the figures contain anyone at all.

Central government funding for local authorities on this issue measures success by these head counts; and this money is channeled through charities and other voluntary agencies. It’s embarrassing if someone turns up with a hot meal and attracts all the uncounted and may have serious funding related repercussions. So no soup for you, dosser.

Comments

[ejh]

I'll never forget that when I once asked my late great-aunt, nearly thirty years ago, whether she thought the Labour Party had achieved anything, she said yes, certainly: they had solved homelessness, you didn't see people sleeping on the streets any more.

At the time this conversation took place, this was probably true, but it didn't take long to undo that small but important piece of human progress, did it? And it was undone deliberately, on the grounds that the social provision involved was supposedly deleterious to the moral character and desire to work of the proletariat. Deliberately. After a generation I still can't get my head round it.

[Alex]

Fuck Birdy. Has he given the Issue back the money he spent moving his g/f out to LA when he was there trying to push "The Bag Issue" (bags. with Serious Questions printed on them) on the States? No? Piss off.