Homeless people in tents have made a ‘lifestyle choice’, says Braverman
Home Secretary proposes new law in bid to prevent aggressive begging, drug-taking and littering in urban areas
On any one night some 3,000 people sleep rough in the country. Near all of which have at least one, usually multiple, mental health, booze or drugs problems.
There are usually two seaprate groups here. One is teenage runaways and the like. Whu usually do get picked up pretty quickly and provided with a hostel space etc. And the core – who have those multiple problems. For euither group it’s not actually housing that is the problem. For the second it’s keeping housing once got that is.
This is hugely more a problem of having closed the asylums for care in hte community than it is anything else.
Sure, making housing cheaper would be great for all sorts of reasons – but it’ll not solve this problem.
Tory MP proposes new law, eh?
Just what we need, more laws.
This is hugely more a problem of having closed the asylums for care in hte community than it is anything else.
.
It used to be, but homelessness is now, like everything else, largely an immigration problem. The First Minister of Scotland was demanding more foreign homeless retards (Muslim flavoured only please) be sent to Scotland just last week, and his English based counterparts are spending £10m a day on hotel rooms for foreign ethnics who fancy living off the mug Brits.
When was the last time you saw an English tramp selling the Beeg Eeshoo?
When was the last time you saw an English tramp selling the Beeg Eeshoo?
When I was travelling up to London from here there was a guy on the west entrance to Waterloo, just after the footbridge. That will have been about 8 years ago. Quite a cheery chap and I always kept a £2 coin to give to him but I never took the magazine, there were too many lying around if I ever got that bored and needed something to read.
Fundamentally the issue is that the law against vagrancy isn’t enforced because street sleeping is “not their fault” when it actually is 🙁
This is hugely more a problem of having closed the asylums for care in hte community than it is anything else.
Absolutely.
Actually I agree with everyone. Booting people out of the loony bins leads to more deros littering the streets.
And more immigration leads to excess demand for housing. Indeed I remember pointing this out to a bloke in the library. They needed the best part of a million new houses, and were importing about a million new migrants that year.
There may be a third group, not linked to homelessness or mental ailments. In my town, there was a woman sitting on the pavement, wrapped in a filthy duvet, though no dog on a string, actively begging for money. She was there for most of the day. When (finally) spoken to by Police, it transpired that she was the wife of an Afghan, given housing and financial benefits by the council, yet sent out to beg for more money. As far as I am aware, after being moved on, she, or someone like her, may be sitting in a shopping area near you, claiming to be homeless and penniless, on the instructions of her husband. Cultural diversity truly is a wonderful thing.
’Cultural diversity truly is a wonderful thing.’
For some, it seems, Penseivat. For some…
But yes, she is right. She often is. But being right and doing something about it just don’t seem to go hand in hand.
If the Scots are so desperate for illegal immigrants, why isn’t England supplying them from their surplus? Last time I looked the East Coast Main Line still exists.
Jgh – the Scots don’t want immigrants.
Like the English, the Scots are ruled by foreigners who hate everything about them (except their money and their land).
My wife is a priest who works at a cathedral. Homeless people wash up from time to time, often staying around, sleeping on benches and in doorways for a few days or weeks. We often buy them a sandwich and a cup of tea. The C of E apparently has a sophisticated and effective referral system for getting these guys into various sorts of accommodation. But I’ve never known any of our current lot accept it. They either make daft excuses as to why they don’t want a place of their own or a bed in a hostel, or they say they prefer living on the streets.
Mild winters.
Then there’s the activists and rights groups who claim we shouldn’t stop people living their life , which means they thinks it’s both a lifestyle choice and the fault of the evil capitalists
In Vancouver the fire service went to the city council and said tents were blocking fire escapes and their presence was a massive safety issue so the council sent out a notice that they were going to move tents for safety reasons then the activists step in and so far there’s been very little enforcement.
The council did start clearing up litter and stuff on the street (police have to escort the refuse crews) but thanks to activist pressure later ended up apologising to the tent dwellers so removing their stuff. When we can’t enforce basic health and safety rules we are truly screwed.
There is also the issues of all the incentives, there’s no a free Vets clinic in the main homeless area for them to bring their animals if they aren’t well. Decriminalisation has led to people taking drugs openly in the street, saw someone doing crack in the main downtown transit hub the other week. Attempts to impose limits on public drug taking (we have rules for public smoking after all) are being attacked by usual suspects as undermining decriminalisation. Frankly the problem isn’t the crazy people on the streets it’s the activists living off them.
To be clear their are many organisations and individuals doing their best just to provide food and shelter (often religious ones) it’s the political bunch that are the issue
If it’s a lifestyle choice, she should be in favour of it as traditonal conservative values include personal choice and responsibility.
But government policy for a very long time has been to apply a threshold, saying that if accommodation does not meet a specific standard it is illegal to let it. That puts a floor on the possible price. Try letting a homeless man sleep in your shed for £1 a night, and you’ll eventually have the local council pursuing you. Preventing homeless people using their own tents is merely an extension of this, which is very much against personal responsibility.
But she is clearly quite crazy in this point as the article points out: “The Government last year said it would repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which made begging and rough sleeping illegal”. So it’s already illegal, just not enforced as that would be stupid. What do you do to someone sleeping on the streets? You can’t fine them, as they have no money, and if you put them in prison you are housing them at a much more expensive rate than merely giving them ordinary housing.
If that Act was passed in 1824 Charles, I suppose they used to round them all up and ship them off to Oz.
This does NOT mean that I want you to ship the drongos off to us if you can be bothered to arrest them.