Homelessness can happen to anyone, it only takes the loss of a job, a couple of months of using your savings whilst searching for new employment, and you’re there.
Homelessness can happen to anyone, it only takes the loss of a job, a couple of months of using your savings whilst searching for new employment, and you’re there.
Well done for leaving the EU, United Kingdom! Congratulations, you got back your blue passports!
But seriously… no one said you couldn’t have blue passports as members of the European Union – so that one is on you. Instead of creating blue passports, we need to start helping blue people, and when I mention blue people, I am not referring to Smurfs, for those that remember the cartoon, nor am I referring to the blue people in the hit movie ‘Avatar’ – I am referring to those unfortunate people, for whatever reason, that have been made homeless. Why are we discussing the colour of a piece of documentation when as the 6th richest country (pre-Brexit the 5th richest country) in the world, we currently have, on record, 9,000 people that are homeless? Is it me or are our priorities somewhat misplaced? While we sit in our comfortable homes and those of the elite are in their ivory towers, 9,000 human beings are homeless. How have we become so increasingly desensitised to this issue in our cities nationwide, from Liverpool to London, Manchester to Birmingham?
The number of people sleeping rough in our cities is clearly on the rise.
The Trussell Trust reports that food bank usage is at record-breaking levels. There are working people that are driven to use food banks as they are clearly struggling to put food on their tables, all while others are championing a cause to change the colour of a piece of paper.
Childhood poverty is on the increase and currently, as was stated in Parliament in December 2017, 120,000 children are homeless, to which our Prime Minister replied, ‘but they are not sleeping on the streets!’
No, Theresa, they are not, but being in a bedsit or a B&B is not the same as having a stable home for a child or a young person. Having a steady and comfortable warm home with food on the table should not be for the privileged few, it should be a staple for the inhabitants of a developed nation in the twenty-first century.
Shouldn’t this be a priority for our politicians and institutions leading the UK? Funds for the most vulnerable should come before discussing the shambles that is Brexit. The amount of money and resources that have been pumped into the chaos that is Brexit demonstrates clearly to the British public how privilege and power work within this particular democracy. During his time as Prime Minister, David Cameron told Nick Clegg categorically that he didn’t want to build social housing because that created Labour voters – so one can infer from this that people are kept homeless or cannot afford permanent housing to ensure the likes of Cameron and Osborne stayed in power. The priorities are so incredibly misplaced that all humanity appears to be lost.
The Grenfell Tower Tragedy saw how the elite in power have dismissed the lives of the working classes to the extent that their lives paid the forfeit. To this day, many of the Grenfell Tower victims are still homeless and waiting to be re-housed, despite the promises made by various people in authority at the time to of the catastrophic event. This tragedy took place in the richest borough in the country; a borough where residents were refunded money as the council had spare cash, and yet refused to install safety procedures and sprinklers in its social housing tower block, which sits on one of the most expensive square miles on the planet. The brave firefighters that risked their lives to rescue the victims in the burning inferno were rewarded for their bravery by the Tories with the continual cap of public sector wages, whilst inflation and prices are on the rise.
Homelessness can happen to anyone. It only takes the loss of a job, a couple of months of using your savings whilst searching for new employment, and you’re there.
Friends’ floors and sofas may be an option for a temporary solution, but then what? Family? What if that isn’t an option, for whatever reason? It doesn’t take much – just a few unfortunate steps. Your school funding, your local hospitals, budgets and local police forces have been feeling the impact of austerity. The Royal Society of Medicine stated that the estimated effect of austerity on health and social care services caused 30,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2015. Austerity does kill. The immigrants are not to blame and neither are the people on benefits. Disabled people and the very poor are not the enemies.
Those that championed Brexit: you have been barking up the wrong tree, but I have a feeling that you knew that all along, and used the immigrants as scapegoats to enhance your pathetic fear mongering and xenophobic campaign which gave rise to the anti-immigrant sentiment, all to furnish your own ugly deceitful ambitions and career. But well done Nigel, BJ and Michael, we got our blue passports back! How’s that working out for you?
To support homeless people in the UK, you can visit some Muslim charities such as As-Suffa, Muslim Aid and Al-Mizan.
