The Tories’ shameful record on the homeless
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Will Covid will make us realise that something must be done about the poor?
By James Bloodsworth
Almost four years ago, I spent several dank hours sitting on a grubby slab of pavement in the summer rain of Blackpool listening to a homeless man recounting his journey from respectable affluence to gut-wrenching poverty. His name was Gary. Every night he bedded down in one of several foul-smelling doorways just off Blackpool’s famous Golden Mile. As if to complete the gloomy mise en scène, he shared this particular doorway with a weather-beaten man whose frame filled his clothes like twigs in a sack.
What struck me was not so much the squalor of his situation: we’re all familiar with the pornography of street life – the dirt and the poverty. What was extraordinary, though, was the suddenness with which Gary had fallen through society’s floorboards. One minute he had a reasonably decent job, a relationship and a flat; the next, everything had unravelled like a poorly knitted scarf. By t...
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