My experience of sleeping in doorways is limited to one occasion some years back. A detailed strategic discussion into the early hours at a union conference impaired an already poor sense of direction and, after wandering round for an hour or so, Morpheus beckoned me to kip down in a shop doorway. As bad luck would have it the shop happened to be a newsagent’s and I was obliged to move on at about 6am.
Once was enough and it did not require an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) to stop me doing it again. Ditto defecating in public places. It does not require too much empathy to work out that if someone is crapping in the street and sleeping in doorways then all is not well in their world. The same goes for anyone whose lack of ambition drives them to shoplift from Iceland, a food store whose produce is so cheap you could feed a village of two hundred people and still have change from a tenner. Whether or not they’d enjoy the experience is another question.
The poster above is on display in council flats in Redbridge, east London. The borough could have chosen to notify residents of what number they need to call to get rid of bulky rubbish, what they should do if they become aware of a child at risk or any of the other useful things local government does. Instead it is encouraging people without very much money to grass on others in the same boat. That’s not the worst of it. Tory Redbridge is making an interactive computer game out of chopping £25million off its budget. Without even living there you can chop millions off the housing and social care budget.
News of the ASBO for rough sleeping and the conviction for nicking stuff from a shop you have to be seriously short of choice to enter in the first place were part of another London council’s advertising campaign demonstrating how it is clamping down on crime. The rest of the feature was a litany of druggies, drunks and the mentally ill getting fined or locked up. It added no detail about what sort of support or accommodation any of these people were offered.
One of the self-evident consequences of local councils agreeing to implement the Con Dem cuts is that people who are sleeping rough and have drink problems are going to have to fend for themselves even more. Local government is going to step up its law and order rhetoric and start shifting responsibility onto the already weak and vulnerable.
Its not without its unintended comic side effects. Boris Johnson’s deputy Kit Malthouse has decided that the solution to problem drinking in London is a bizarre American idea which obliges people to have sobriety tests in the morning and evening. Trawling around for some opinions on the matter I came across this point of view : “Islam gave us the best solution 1400 years ago, a few lashes on the backside would get the infidels sobered up”.
Expect it in places like Redbridge anytime now.
Liam redux 
Leave a reply to daveinstokenewington Cancel reply