'Dear Suella Braverman: Being heartless is a lifestyle choice'
For those who only heard the news with half an ear, it sounded like the Tory government had managed to find a home for all the homeless people.
It stands to reason that, if the Home Secretary is suggesting taking their only home away from homeless people, they need to have one in the first place. Otherwise you're giving them a negative number of homes, which is a novel way of approaching a housing crisis.
Seems a bit much when they've only just moved in, mind you. Apparently they're bad neighbours. Did they let the Leylandii get out of control, park on the kerb, leave their bins out on the wrong day?
Listen a little more closely, and it seems Suella Braverman has decided homeless people live in squalor in these homes they've only just got. They take drugs and commit crimes, and it's only by taking away the homes and rendering them homeless again that she can lift them out of that squalor and make them nicer neighbours.
"Well, it made sense yesterday" (PA)If you haven't screwed your face up and read that a second time, then you're probably the Home Secretary, who is the only person to whom this all makes perfect sense. Let's rewind the tape, and double-check the doublethink.
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She announced that "British people are compassionate" and then showed she wasn't, by claiming people living in tents are "taking over", are mostly "from abroad", and "living on the streets as a lifestyle choice". She warned that letting it continue would lead to "an explosion of crime, drug taking, and squalor".
Braverman said what compassionate people always do, which is "nobody in Britain should be living in a tent on our streets", and then said what compassionate people never do, which was that the best way of getting people out of tents was to take away the tents, and fining the charities who handed them out.
That's a bit like saying your preferred method of discharging hospital patients in a timely manner is to bomb the hospitals, and then charge the NHS to clean up the dismembered limbs.
"But I've just proved they can run, or at least fall out of bed." (PA)Let's park the mad for a bit. Here are some facts:
1. There were 311,990 homeless people in the UK in the past year, up 7% from the year before. It includes 157,000 homeless households, and 54,000 due to be evicted by their landlords - a jump of 22% in no-fault evictions.
2. About 3,000 sleep rough on the average night. That doesn't mean there's only 3,000 rough sleepers, it means that people dip in and out of the figures. They melt into the hospital admissions, the prison system, the overnights in the cells. Sometimes they find somewhere to doss for a week or two. Rough sleeping figures are, as you'd expect, transient.
3. Despite a massive body of evidence which shows that giving rough sleepers a home, an address, a shower, a bed and a reason to hope, gets them off the streets in the long-term, no UK government has ever bothered to do it.
4. None of this is Suella's responsibility. It's the job of the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities, who is called Michael Gove.
Yes, him (AFP/Getty Images)Crime is Suella's purview, of course, as is drugs. But it is hard to understand why she thinks homeless people are LESS likely to indulge in these things, when the considered view has long been that sleeping rough gives people a powerful thirst for narcotics and a corresponding likelihood to steal.
Perhaps what she's doing is highlighting Gove's gross failure in presiding over a 7% increase in homelessness, and a 22% rise in no-fault evictions? Or maybe she's a Labour double agent, trying to make people see there are 74% more people sleeping rough every night now than there was in 2010 when the Tories came to power.
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She's definitely shown how bad she is at thinking and talking at the same time. Homeless people do not commit more crimes or take more drugs because they sleep in a tent. It's not Glastonbury. Generally speaking, addictions either throw people on to the streets, or develop as a means of surviving them. And if tents are too squalid, not having a tent is infinitely more so.
And these aren't even homeless people's tents. They're given out by charities, using donations from the British public. If you've ever donated to Shelter, this is YOUR tent the Home Secretary wants to seize and destroy. She's decided without any evidence that people from much warmer climes come to Britain, take one look at the November weather, and chose to sleep on a damp pavement with a sliver of polyester between them and the elements.
'Mmm, so much better than southern Europe at this time of year' (Getty Images)She might have a point, if they were glamping in an 6-bed airbeam with sofa, fridge, and an electrical hook-up. And it was June. In Dorset. And it was only for a week.
Camping holidays are a lifestyle choice. Getting a hair cut, switching to own-brand Jaffa Cakes, vegetarianism, repainting the bedroom, are all lifestyle choices. Getting a raging meth problem, juggling ulcers, and losing all contact with your loved ones is not a choice so much as spectacular bad luck which it has been the authorities' duty to help people out with since the Elizabethan poor laws of 1598.
Those laws meant local government was obliged to give cash and food to those who needed it most. It became effectively illegal to punish the homeless, until Braverman decided helping them was akin to encouragement.
The chances are there'd be more crime, drugs and squalor without those tents, not less. But then, she doesn't care about that.
The only reason Braverman is stepping on another minister's toes is to grab headlines. The only reason she's going after charities and a Tory moderate is because she wants to whip up frenzies and attention. And the only reason she says homelessness is a lifestyle choice is because she's decided that being heartless will make her Tory leader next year.
People who only half-heard her now see tents as a threat. The charities that help the homeless seem like facilitators, and the millions raised annually for the homeless at Christmas is looking shaky.
And for why? Not because it would end crime or gets people off drugs. Not because it ends homelessness, or the Tories are going to do a single thing to end the cycle of bad luck, intolerance, and official disdain which makes more of it. She's being this stupid, this obtuse, because her party is about to be rudderless and she wants to steer it as far to the right as it will go.
She would destroy the Tories more thoroughly than a Labour landslide, and she's less likely to be Prime Minister than a bag of Pick'n'Mix from the Hate-filled Sweeties Store. Suella Braverman is an intellectual vacuum in a moral void, who has no good reason to be so heartless but has decided to be so anyway. And that's a truly squalid lifestyle choice.
* You can donate to Shelter here
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