We Shouldn't ... And Most Of Us Don't!

In January 2017, the then mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, promised to end rough sleeping in the region by 2020 – a bold, frankly absurd promise that inevitably didn’t materialise. Nearly a decade later, shortly after becoming prime minister, Burnham promised to end rough sleeping again, only this time for the whole of England. So why should we believe him this time around?

We shouldn’t, of course. Because he's just as big a liar as the unlamented Starmer.

I have interviewed Burnham several times over the past decade. At the end of 2019, when it was clear he had not lived up to his promise, I asked him if he regretted making it in the first place. “I wasn’t making what you would call a traditional target,” the mayor said. “I issued my commitment to make it more of a wake-up call to the system. And I think it has had that effect.”Burnham’s advisers had told him to tone down the pledge, but he resisted. “The team here said I should have said: ‘End the need for rough sleeping,’ because you can’t force people into a shelter … In retrospect, if I had said ‘end the need for’, that probably would have been a wiser thing to have done. But I wasn’t in the space of wanting to play semantics with it.”

A lot of verbiage to say, ‘Oh, damn, you caught me out!’, eh Reader? 

Official figures showed rough sleeping decreased by two-thirds in Manchester during his first five years as mayor. There are reasons I can quibble with this claim. First of all, it doesn’t pass the eye test. Just walk through the city centre in the early hours, and you’ll find people still bedding down in their dozens. Second, the statistics on rough sleeping are based on single-night snapshots, which involve council representatives walking around counting the people they find rough sleeping. The problem with this is obvious.

Government statistics are lies? Gosh, you don't say... 

Burnham’s government would also need to reverse 16 years of austerity. This is all quite spendy, and to fund it would require higher taxes, more borrowing and aggressive nationalisation of natural monopolies. An upheaval of the economy of such magnitude is unlikely to happen when so many Labour MPs have their fingernails firmly embedded in the market. If there’s even a suggestion that Burnham intends to depart from turbo capitalism, then he will be out of SW1 faster than you can say Liz Truss.

Ha ha ha  he things we had 'austerity'. What a comedian!

His priority should be triggering a nationwide Housing First programme. Housing First, a policy pioneered in Finland that effectively eliminated rough sleeping, gives people a home with no preconditions, then tailors support to their individual needs.We know this works because we did it ourselves, only with a different name. The Everyone In campaign, established during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtually ended rough sleeping overnight by emergency block-booking hotels. Surely we can do the same thing again.

That was a measure for a short time event, not a permanent solution, there's a difference. And how can the government block-book hotels, when they are already being used for boat people? 

There are about 300,000 long-term empty homes in England. Housing people in some of these dwellings might be a good idea; capping rents at an affordable rate would be another, as would fast-tracking asylum applications and enabling asylum seekers to receive benefits and temporary work visas while their claims are processed.

We have a housing crisis, according to yoy, and you want to increase it by increasing the population? 

I’m not confident that Burnham will do any of these things. Not because I think he doesn’t care or lacks the political will, but because government apparatus is smothered in molasses, and most Labour politicians are Tories in all but name.

What in the student politics...?!?  

The Only Form Of Visible Virtue Signalling The Left Doesn't Support

At the start of last week, I was thinking my regular Remembrance season thoughts – Are people wearing poppies earlier every year? – and by the middle of the week, I’d agreed to have a quick morning argument about poppies on the radio. David Lammy had been caught in parliament without one, and roundly castigated. He had responded with sentiments to the effect that Remembrance Sunday was the most important day of the year; nobody found it more important than him; anyone who didn’t think it was important was not a patriot; and by sheer hideous happenstance, he had a new suit, and his poppy was on the other suit. 

Yes, that sound like the sort of hopelessly incompetent bluster one can expect when David Lamentable has been caught out again... 

Some of us were thus called on to adjudicate on remembrance, while the more agile wing of the commentariat was wondering how Lammy could afford a new suit.

Perhaps he too is a friend of Lord Ali? 

Anyway, my line hasn’t changed on this for at least 25 years. Wear a poppy, don’t wear a poppy, both are legitimate positions. Honouring the fallen is worthwhile. Finding all that performative honour a bit militaristic, and declining to have your love of country elided with celebration of war, even in a tinged-with-sorrow way, also worthwhile. You do you.

Strange hoe suddenly it's up to individuals, and to suggest that they ought to wear a visible sign of approval with something is not considered an appalling attack on the thing itself, eh?  

Anyway, Sunday came, I was bombing along the Thames on my bike, and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t allowed to cycle round Parliament Square, nor why all the crash barriers were down across Westminster Bridge. It wasn’t until I noticed a large number of people wearing medals that I clocked it; I’d spent so long arguing about poppies that I’d forgotten it was Remembrance Sunday.

Ladies and gentleman, the Left! So in touch with Britain!  

Neurotics

Now there’s a girl who’s comfortable in her own skin,” my father-in-law said about my daughter, his granddaughter. She was about one year old and we were watching her bounce happily in her high chair, egg smeared across both cheeks as she shoved pieces of fritter into her mouth. I realised with pride it was true: she was comfortable. My pride was followed quickly by unease. How long had it been since I could say I was comfortable with myself?

Well, you’re writing in the ‘Guardian’ so probably ‘never’!

My daughter is almost four now and I’ve thought of my father-in-law’s words many times since that day. She’s at a precious age, no longer a toddler and still just on the precipice of childhood proper. She interacts with the world without self-consciousness and has not yet learned that society may expect something different from her. When she expresses hunger and when she eats, she does so with joyful abandon. When she takes a mouthful of something delicious we can see a whole-body response: she closes her eyes, tilts her head back and dances her shoulders up and down.

Because she’s a child and so lacks inhibition - part of growing up is of course learning social inhibition, which so many adults these days appear to lack. 

Many girls will learn, if not explicitly taught then by cultural osmosis, the notion they shouldn’t be outwardly hungry. Whether a girl’s hunger is literally for food or it’s yearning for something greater in her life – a high-powered career, an unabashed artistic practice, a passionate affair – she is often taught to not be so honest in her expression of it.

*sighd* 

Watching my daughter’s strong sense of self has forced me to reflect on my own adolescence through the early 2000s, when our wildly misogynistic pop culture filtered down to the schoolyard. I once overheard a high-school boyfriend say I looked ugly when I ate. Instead of dumping him, I simply stopped eating when we were together.

Teenagers do stupid things pt 732489... 

Later, in my 20s, when Instagram brought with it the first wave of diet culture masquerading as “wellness”, I was primed to try it all: juice cleanses, appetite-suppressing teas, “quitting” sugar. I once lied to a colleague that I was eating soup for lunch when I had, in fact, poured green juice into a bowl.

 Women trying to make it in work do stupid things pt 732489... 

These memories are horrifying to me now and thank God for that. Thank God that in my daughter’s world there is no morality ascribed to food, there is no good or bad, or that most disgusting of office kitchen diet-speak, naughty. There is just desire and pleasure and satiety.

It might be a little trite to say that adults can learn from watching children interact with the world...

It certainly is.