Having an ignominious stand-off with my child, outside the local food bank, wasn’t quite how I envisaged Christmas Eve. It had been brewing since before we left the house. He was having second thoughts about donating some of his toys, which were thrown in (by me) to make the box of food we had prepared look less, utilitarian.
To be fair, said offspring (who, like Andy in Toy Story, wants to find loving homes for his beloved toys at a time of his choosing) has a heightened social conscience. Children aren’t born with it, it’s learned through exposing them to situations where they have the opportunity to empathise with vulnerable human beings and teaching them not to judge. My parents taught me that destitution is not a life choice and that it can happen to any-one.
“There, but for the grace of God, go I”! That’s what my father said whenever we saw a homeless person on the streets. Even when he had no money himself, he never walked past without giving people he called, “our friends,” the time of day. “A kind word costs nothing”, he’d say.
We’ve instilled that ethos of humanity in our child, who regularly pitches up to sell The Big Issue for our friend, Samaria. When her baby was born dead recently, he raided his piggy bank to help pay for the headstone. She wouldn’t take his £25 so he bought toys for her two other children for Christmas instead.
On a visit to the German Christmas market in Birmingham last week, we met Stephen. He told us he had been sleeping on the streets for 13 months. I asked him if he knew the homeless man, Paul, found dead nearby the previous week. He did, “and more besides that never get reported”. He wept silently as he sipped a coffee that a kind man had given him, along with a half-eaten sausage roll (note to well-meaning folk, if you wouldn’t eat scraps, don’t give them to homeless people).
Recent research by Crisis, revealed that the actual number of people sleeping rough on the streets of England is double the 9,000, previously estimated, when hidden rough sleepers (such as those sleeping in tents and cars) are factored in.
The charity Shelter also revealed that child homelessness has reached a 10-year high, with nearly 130,000 children in Britain waking up homeless and in temporary accommodation this Christmas.
The family went to see A Christmas Carol last week. An eerie, tangible sadness befell the cinema during the iconic scene in the counting house, where two men of means attempt to extract money from Scrooge for charity. Affronted that the poor would shun workhouses, for which he paid his taxes, he admonished, If they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Dickens’ words never felt so real and their resonance so cruel. Increasingly, our taxes are not funding safety nets to catch our vulnerable, but are being siphoned off quietly to repay the debts owed to the rich (and the DUP) who have underwritten this tyrannical Tory regime.
The erosion of the welfare state under the Tories has seen women’s refuges closed and child poverty and homelessness soar. Recent analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated the number of children living in poverty is set to rise to a record 5.2 million over the next five years (it’s currently 4 million). Causal factors identified were frozen benefits and the introduction of universal credit. Concerned GPs who are seeing an increase in Victorian illnesses like rickets are piloting food prescriptions to malnourished children.
My father’s compassion was born of his own experience of falling on hard times when, as a young man, he was robbed en-route from rural Ireland to a new life in London. His entire savings – enough to cover his first month’s rent, gone. He had to work as a labourer for a month before he received a penny in wages. During that time he stayed in a “doss house” for the homeless and lived on jam sandwiches.
In 2018, I’ll continue to contribute to food banks and buy The Big Issue, but for people like Stephen, Samaria and Paul (may he rest in peace), that’s just not good enough. Much more must be done to redress this government’s “abject failure” in tackling homelessness. Abandoning austerity would be a good place to start
No comments:
Post a Comment