BY SEAN WALSH
Instead of just being a regular guy and buying a motorbike, getting a tattoo, or doing the American Beauty thing, Andy Burnham had to include all of us in his mid-life crisis by becoming prime minister.
It’s still shocking to think that the constituents of Makerfield hate the rest of the country so much that they would impose this on us. But it is what it is, as we are all supposed to say these days. And now Mr Burnham must find ways of turning platitude into policy, of “bringing hope to every postcode.”
Beginning with bringing hope to those who currently lack one. Or have too many, depending on how you look at it.
Top of his wish list of (impossible) things to get done is a laudable but forlorn ambition to “end rough sleeping,” armed only with the failure of his attempt in Manchester to do the same and some £350 million which, in terms of government largesse, is the change so loose that you can’t even be bothered to retrieve it from the back of the couch.
It is good that he is proposing to spend so little of our money on his vanity project. Burnham will not solve the problem of rough sleeping for the good reason that there is no single “problem” here to solve, but many.
I was a rough sleeper, then hostel homeless, then a rough sleeper (again), and then hostel homeless (again) for two years between 2015 and 2017. I bilked hotels, stole from shops, and worse.
What I can say is that there is a distinctive anthropology of street homelessness. It has its own culture, idiom, etiquette, and hierarchies. Street living can be “nasty, brutish and short,” but there are unexpected kindnesses and certain expectations about how you should conduct yourself, should you be intending to survive. I knew a few who did not.
Rough sleeping is a condition as much as a situation. People who are “out” do not experience time in quite the same way. This is important. When your relationship to time becomes disordered, then your assessment of the connection between action and consequence is similarly distorted. Minor slights tend to escalate very quickly.
I was in that life partly because of addiction, but also because I deserved to be. Other people are pitched into it for reasons of mental and spiritual health. By which I mean that for many rough sleepers, street life is the saner option, if it minimises interaction with a system whose controllers – the political and commentator classes – have immunised themselves against the worst of its effects.
It is the “normal” world that seems to many people to be the Matrix.
We have a political culture which expects us to celebrate untruths and absurdities, transgenderism being only the most obvious example. You cannot impose logical contradiction onto the pattern of human thought without in the end making the thinker go mad.
People sense this. Is it a surprise if some prefer to go off the grid?
And then there are the criminal gangs for whom rough sleeping is a workable business model. A relatively recent addition to the character of street life, if you get my drift.
Most people who are surviving on the streets neither want to nor should be in that crisis. But the truth is that it is government, national and local, that is keeping them there. The escape routes that were available to me ten years ago have been choked off by the consequences of the failed multicultural experiment.
When it comes to social housing allocation, the hierarchy of need has been reinterpreted – most relevantly at local level – in ways which unapologetically favour the stranger.
It is likely a mistake to look to government to “solve” this crisis because governments never “solve” anything, and it is only a disordered (which is to say “socialist”) mind that would think otherwise.
The new prime minister is being frivolous about this complex of problems, and we know this for two reasons. Firstly, he is proposing to make this an issue for central government while simultaneously proposing to strengthen the powers of local authorities (which is perilously close to prescribing another of those contradictions).
Secondly, to do what needs to be done, he would have to go up against lanyard orthodoxy and the ambient culture of asphyxiating, fake niceness. Labour politicians are quite capable of the most extreme cruelty but must at all costs at least seem to be nice about inflicting it.
But the people who have chosen the countercultural lifestyle have a point and should be left alone. And the addicts and the mentally ill who haven’t need harsh kindness rather than ineffectual niceness.
Burnham’s only political asset is an ability to come over as a “nice bloke.” He won’t be spending that political capital on hobo snatch squads or the dismantling of tented cities.
The best way to address the crisis of rough sleeping is to get people interested in it. That should not be hard, for reasons adduced above. The problem here – and this one is genuine – is aesthetic. Street homelessness is ugly and unattractive and therefore difficult to engage with.
That said, from the perspective of Heaven, so are all of us. That doesn’t stop Him trying.