Tories say 'rough sleeping is a lifestyle choice

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Absolutely disgusting:


Suella Braverman: Minister distances herself from home secretary's comment that rough sleeping is 'lifestyle choice'

Rishi Sunak also declined to repeat the phrase when questioned by reporters this morning - but stopped short of criticising his home secretary.


https://news.sky.com/story/minister-dis ... e-13001774

Last edited by Rossall on 06 Nov 2023, 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

Perfectly on brand.

Yep!

Tory as*holes.

Homelessness is a societal problem more than anything.

Well, to give credit where it's due, it was only one Tory said it (Braverman), and she didn't exactly say that:

"The British people are compassionate. We will always support those who are genuinely homeless. But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice."

It's still a load of crap, IMO:
1. British people are no more compassionate than any other people, so that's just a lie to to butter us up.
2. She has a strange definition of "support." Persecution seems a more appropriate term.
3. "...tents, many of them from abroad." Those annoying foreigners again. The insinuation seems to be that it's not so bad if you're a Briton.
4. "living on the streets as a lifestyle choice." Even that seems doubtful, though personally I don't know who she's talking about.

I'll never understand any support for the tories.

It's just another way to kick the most vulnerable in society again.

Take away benefits
Take away tents
Next they'll be taking away the shirts off our backs.

Fuçking çunts

Hear hear!

Is actually old news that was said ages ago (I think by someone else in the party and was at the time quoted way out of context) and brought up again by reporters to sell news articles.

There are a few who have chosen this route as a lifestyle but only a few. Most are desperate and lonely and pretty vunerable and need our help.

It breaks my heart to see us paying huge amounts of cash on things that do not matter such as space projects and other things we do not need, when all along right in our towns and cities we have the desperate and vunerable who have lost their way.
I am not claiming we should not dream and invent projects, but lets see to the neccessary things first before we do them.

There are a great many untapped tallents amongst the homeless and their homlessness is not their failure, but our governments failure for spending the money on luxury projects and not on the needs of the people.

For every rocket we send into space we could not only provide food and shelter for several thousand people, but also set them up with an income to tap into their tallents so some of them can be the next entropeneurs! We need to give them a step up, and many of them have issues that need sorting to do this. It saddens me when we see projects we don't need done in the name of "Science" or other headings, when we have the desperate needs of others.
Why can't every penny raised in climate change tax go directly to provide the homeless with sheltered accomodation, food and help, along with the remainder to support the NHS? Why is it going into the hands of the multinational industries inthe form of grants? They have the money themselves to "Go green"!

I don't know about the situation in the UK, but here in the US quite a bit of it is by choice, particularly in coastal cities with mild weather and generous welfare benefits. Between the mental illness and the addictions, quite a few of these people prefer to live on the street rather than in a shelter that will make them stay clean or take meds they don't want to, I don't know why acknowledging this is so difficult for some.

It's true for some addicts.. that living outdoors is cleaner and safer than some of the limited shelter environments available. But almost all of them would prefer some form of safe permanent housing.

There are ever more homeless people via the pressures of economic circumstances. Landlords evict people to move family in for the minimum time period required by law before they can re-rent the space at far higher market rates.. and the outgoing tenants can't find any suitable place available, never mind one they can afford.. so, people with what are considered very healthy working class incomes find themselves sleeping in cars/trucks/vans/rvs/tents etc. It's pretty f*****g crazy that someone can earn $70k/year and can't afford to rent a 3 bedroom apartment or basement suite for their family to live in as the rent prices often exceed 100% of their net income, never mind paying for everything else - food/transportation etc.

These aren't the people shooting up in public and trashing West coast cities.

It gets me how many unused spaces you see. Abandoned buildings that if you point them out to others, you'll typically get the response 'Huh, I never noticed that building before'.

I see this with old schools that haven't been schools for quite some time. The ones with either a boarded up entrance or they will have two entrances (one for boys and one for girls). Sure, the inside is likely in a bad state, but is it not possible to fix such places up? Or demolish them? Why do they just sit there? Are we keeping them for historical purposes? If so, why are we letting them fall into disrepair? Could we not repurpose them into something? Community spaces? I wonder if anyone squats in them. Or if the ceilings are secure. The ones with blocked entrances clearly don't have people inside, but what about the ones that have entrances? Can you get in them? Are they locked? I've never tried opening the doors on such buildings. Frankly I'd rather not find out the consequences. Still, I have to wonder who owns them. Local council? I could probably find out.

It is a myth that most homeless people are homeless by choice. There are the odd exceptions to the general homeless population who do choose to be homeless, but it is almost never the case.

There are countless reasons why a person cannot comfortably live on welfare benefits (which certainly are not generous) and are often precarious and conditional. Most people on benefits live in poverty or are close to the poverty line.

Having welfare money often results in addicts (homeless people are often addicts as you even acknowledge in your post) - spending their money on addictions which ultimately can lead to being evicted. Many homeless people don't have the mental capacity to keep up with rent payments, even if they don't spend their money on drugs or gambling, for example.

Another problem is a lack of social housing. Waiting lists are often long for social housing, and even if a person gets priority because they are homeless, they have to stay in particular places that have curfews and conditions to be able to continue on the waiting list for social housing.

Imagine traversing the rules and regulations of a hostel for example, whilst high on goodness knows what?

There is a chronic shortage of help for drug addicts or people with mental health problems who cannot effectively lead a civilized life without something going wrong, i.e, being evicted for missed payments or playing music too often loudly whilst high, or having friends around a place whilst high and them trashing a place etc.

All of this leads to people dropping outside of the welfare system and ending up on the street, which can become a trap of sorts that is difficult to get out of.

And also worth mentioning is that street homeless is different than homeless. A person may be in precarious temporary accommodation that is dangerous to them, i.e, a pregnant woman being in a shared facility with mentally ill or drug addicted men and so on.

A lot of abandoned buildings are abandoned because they cost too much to invest in to become profitable again.

And profit is all investors think about, sadly.

Social cohesion and renovation be damned.

^I don't know how a single person on welfare here even has a room to rent. Just looked it up, welfare pays $11k/year, disability pays $16k/year. (the highest gov't cheque possible) Just a bedroom now costs over 1k/mo to rent.. so, people have to have literal roommates and share bedrooms I suppose. And if they end up homeless and have no fixed address, their welfare rates are reduced dramatically.. making it ever harder to possibly rent another place that's more expensive than the one you lost when you had a higher income.

I think a lot of people overlook how difficult & expensive it is to be poor. Literally everything costs more when you have no money and getting back on your feet isn't as simple as "deciding to not live outside anymore." Lolol funny-not-funny.. how exactly is someone supposed to make the shift back into a rented home when they have no money and no job and they can't get Most jobs because they have no address? It's a difficult process, that's for damned sure.

Plus a Lot of things end up costing people more.. with no way to store food, people buy convenience stuff and take out food for a lot more money than groceries. If they can't afford a decent pair of shoes/boots, they buy cheap ones that don't last and have to be replaced. If their ID gets lost or stolen, they're really up s**t creek without a paddle for a while. Phones get stolen non stop when people fall asleep. etc etc.

People who say it's a choice should be stripped of everything but the clothes on their back and told to go choose to be housed and see how that works out for them.

Is "rough sleeping" a British term for homeless?

So how are people supposed to afford a living if everything is too damn expensive and wages are low and there is no affordable housing?