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 in central London, and spends his days on the streets or in the day-centers, 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 war, and Northern Ireland. He remembers some of his fellow soldiers, 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. The Conservative-led government of David Cameron is shutting down great swathes of the hostels and mental health centers 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 to give Steven a bowl of soup.
Earlier this week, the Conservative-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 theater-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 preemptively 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 Margaret 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 accommodation. 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 Royal bank of Scotland bankers, and ringfenced it for the homeless instead.
The same process is being imposed by conservatives in the US. One of the Republican priorities since they assumed power has been to cut funding to keep low birth weight babies healthy and alive.
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, along with Wall Street, 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 -- and conservatives everywhere -- punishing him for their crimes?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk
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what in their heads makes it OK to do stuff like this?
I dont get it, i just dont get it.
"The fascinating and disturbing thing is that many of the conservatives writing here would count themselves as the "ordinary people who toil away every day".. but somehow, instead of looking at the uber-rich and pondering the disparity, they identify with the wealthy against those who are unfortunate. They see the wealthy as they see themselves: "people who toil every day", while the poor, unemployed, and/or unfortunate do not toil, and therefore, do not deserve.
Instead of seeing the uber-wealthy as taking their earnings, they see the poor and unfortunate as taking their earnings. They also fear the state of the poor and the unfortunate. They want to feel that because they are "good, hard-working", etc., that they will never suffer the same fate as those they despise. The thought that "There, but for the grace of God, goes I." cannot be allowed to enter into their consciousness because it is so terrifying.
There are a lot of these people, but every time someone who was formerly middle class gets laid off, loses unemployment benefits, enters the realm of the long-term unemployed, or starts to struggle for reasons not of their own making, the ranks of the middle class who identify with the billionaires is thinned."
Republican Wisconsin Gov. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette. Look him up and ask yourselves WHY did he start the US progressive political movement???????????
Hard to imagine.
momento mori. You too are made of clay. And you too will return to clay.
Mathew 19:24 It is easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
Mathew 25
‘Depart from me, you who are cursed... For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
Corinthians 13:13 Faith , Hope and Charity. Of these three Charity is the greatest.
The modern scale of human suffering dictates that only a governmental expression of Charity paid for through progressive taxation can make the necessary difference . Piecemeal has proved insufficient time and again. Charity hospitals were tried and FAILED.
Cvan, there are at least two issues here:
First, what are our goals as a civilized society? How many in our country (or the UK) think that it is civilized to leave the homeless to fend for themselves and/or starve under a bridge? How many think they should be helped in some way? Our Constitution mandates that we "provide for the general welfare." It is up to us as a people to decide what kind of "general welfare", what kind of "civilization", we want for our country.
Is it civilized for us as a country to leave the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, physically ill, some of whom are merely among the long-term unemployed or who are children, to fend for themselves, to starve and die under a bridge? Is that the definition of civilization, of "general welfare", that you would like to see us as a nation embrace?
A co-related issue is, assuming that goals can be determined for the "civilized" society as a whole, and those goals include providing services so that the poor and the unfortunate don't die under a bridge, how do we allocate the resources of our country (or, for those in the UK, how do they allocate the resources of their country), to assure that our goals of a civilized society are met?
We have enough money to give tax breaks to the rich, to fly planes and hit targets over Libya; clearly there is some money available. We have people earning billions a year (hedge fund managers), and we have CEO's who get multi-million dollar bonuses (and sometimes actually create homelessness) by laying people off, cutting wages, and off-shoring jobs. Please remember that these people have helped to create homelessness and foreclosure. Certainly those peoples should have some responsibility to meliorate the problems that they have helped to create.
Do you really think that a civilized society allows people, even children, to live and die without regular shelter if there are other options? Don't you think that "promoting the general welfare" includes making sure that the least among us have some safety, shelter, food.. and help to return them to becoming productive members of our country?
All the progressives can do is whine, and not make a strong case for these cuts to the rich; guess they are just too cowardly to say anything and offend their master contributors and future employers.
What are you doing about these issues?
They have no self discipline and can't come up with a real message.
Of course nobody at the top saw a cut in taxes... Most progressive know that very well.. those cuts were in effect for ten years, for heaven's sake.
The big problem with our huge deficit was and continues to be the two unfunded wars, and those large tax cuts for the years that have been ongoing for ten years.
I've wondered if the same dynamics were taking place outside of the US, and it is apparently so. I guess the conservative mindset can be manipulated just about anywhere on the planet. What makes conservatives believe in political partisanship so blindly? In a sad way, it is fascinating.
1776 - FOX News
The USA is one of the worst-educated of all the technological societies. In particular, everything that you have learned since leaving school has come from sources dependent upon corporate advertising budgets. You can expect those to slant the truth, and violently oppose it if it might hurt their income. You cannot run a democracy with such tarnished information. You have government of the people, perhaps by the people, but using information controlled rather effectively by the plutocracy.
Their country is not broke and neither is ours. It is the excuse used to do what they are doing - the same lie and excuse Scott Walker is using in Wisconsin to break the Unions - which is the real goal. Just the other day Walker made the claim that he was receiving 10s of thousands of emails supporting his Union Busting, anti-collective bargaining measures - but when he was literally forced to show these supposed emails - nothing could have been further from the truth. It was a bald faced lie - just as Cameron is using bald faced lies to destroy the lower classes.
It is class warfare.
I will never understand the truly malevolent mysanthropic mingset that enables so-called conservatives to gloat over denying a fellow human being shelter and sustenance. My god man we are talking about soup lines!
"If you are poor, it's because you are out of God's favor, and deserve it."
"God helps those who help themselves."
We can thank religion for our tortured beliefs about money and the poor. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an excellent book, if you want to understand where these opinions came from.
Why is this so hard to learn? Case study New York: Dinkens tolerated and even encouraged homelessness, filth, street crime. Giuliani didn't. Which environment would you rather live in? Which is more "compassionate" -- giving the addict a needle, or taking away the option of being an addict. Should we be handing out more fish, or giving fishing lessons? Should we continue to extend unemployment benefits until we have an entire class of the professionally unemployed?
And FYI, many many more case studies have proven that compassionate progressive programs do alter social ills and reduce addiction and homelessness.
Mysanthrops will get theirs in the end. Even the most famous right wing conservative John Wayne cried for himself on his deathbed.
God Bless Each and Everyone of You
I just found out that you are planning to make it illegal to feed poor people.
Good for you!!
What a better world this will be when all this "moral superiority" and so-called "Christian Values" nonsense that I endlessly hear in church is scrapped.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." (Matthew 5:7) Thank God & Jesus that only matters when you're dead.
Why do we want to foster dependency?
The despots think they have won because they have money and power, but they will not have the Lord on their sides because they do not follow him. He is only on their lips but not in their hearts.
Too much conservative Koolaid for you!
You don't give your kids everything for free? (atleast I hope) And in the end it teaches them a good lesson about earning somthing! So why do we in our society feel the need to give things away that most people have to work very hard for. My Mother had to work 2 full time jobs for years just to provide for our family. Nobody ever gave her anything, and her three kids went on to be successes, and take care of her for the most part, and she retired young!! Nothing free their!!
Why did your mother work 2 jobs if you were an able body? You are disgraceful.
Unfortunately the rich and powerful hate having their taxes raised to bring them down to earth and remind them that All Men Are Created Equal.
The leaders get theirs and then turn the public against their neighbor - can see it in posts - - all the hate posted is amazing. They have declared war on the poor, handicapped, elderly and sick ---and 1/2 of the people buy it - - bombs are ok - food for a baby -NO!!!!
A civilization cannot be called civilized unless it shows compassion towards those that need it.
So I actually do something - I don't even care if the person I feed drinks alcohol - all I know is people need help - - and if I can help - -I will.
I wrote something very similar above... What is our definition of "civilized"?
If my wife dies, I should expect the government to take care of me while I walk around in a stuper?
THAT sounds nuts to me.
It's terrible that we have to deal with reality in our lives and sometimes it's not pretty...
Oh well...
Next............