Across Britain, many of you will have noticed the vastly increasing numbers of homeless that occupy our major towns and cities. Large encampments besmirch the pavements and green areas, surrounded by litter and bodily fluids. Occupied by drug users who harass and scream at people going to work or who scare children walking to school. Some are often passed out laying across the pavement, with commuters having to step over them. In Westminster, villages of tents occupied the banks of the Thames earlier this year, opposite Parliament and next to the Covid memorial wall, tourists took their pictures in between the gaps.
You would be forgiven for thinking Britain wasn’t a first-world country, it somehow is, London isn’t Mumbai, and Liverpool isn’t Nairobi.
You will also have noticed the increasing number of beggars that occupy the streets of Britain, sitting outside shops and by cash machines.
It’s not an exaggeration to state that Britain is becoming a less pleasant place to live. Dirty, unsafe, and often scary for many.
There are an estimated 230,000 households classified as homeless according to the charity Crisis and Heriot Watt University. This includes those sleeping on the streets, in cars or sheds, or in insecure accommodation. An individual estimate for those sleeping on the street is harder to come by, but some estimates put it around 28,000 people. The government officially put the number at ‘2,440 people estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2021’, but this only applies to England.
Of those 2,440 people sleeping rough, 25% were foreign nationals. 67% were British nationals, and 8% were unknown. In London, 49% of those sleeping rough were foreign nationals, with 16% unknown. A Westminster council analysis all the way back in 2015 found that 61% of rough sleepers were foreign nationals.
If these figures seem low to you, it’s because they are. During the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, the government as part of its ‘Everyone In’ scheme, housed approximately 37,430 people.
Begging is even harder to calculate, but interestingly a BBC investigation in 2015 found that ‘only one in five beggars are homeless’. The number of arrests for begging in 2019 equalled 926 in total.
But, it’s not that Britain’s streets are lined with tents that is the main issue, although it is less than ideal. It’s that 62.5% of Britains homeless are drug and alcohol abusers, with 53.7% having mental health problems. A study published all the way back in 2002 discovered that ‘Four out of five homeless people in Britain are regular drug-users – and almost half have used heroin or crack in the last month’. This is what causes concern and fear amongst members of the public, with the earlier Westminster council report making a note of reported ‘no-go areas’ as a consequence of the significant, often violent, drugged up and intimidating homeless population.
So, what has happened over the last ten years? Why is Britain turning into one big dirty drug-addled, crime-ridden homeless camp? It’s a very easy answer, our politicians did this, the British ruling class allowed and even encouraged this to happen.
Starting with the increasingly relaxed enforcement of our laws, the Vagrancy Act 1824 is a 198-year-old law that makes it illegal to sleep rough or beg in England and Wales, it was repealed in 1982 in Scotland, and in 1990 in Northern Ireland. You can see from the table that both prosecutions and convictions using the act have drastically fallen over the last ten years, prosecutions have fallen more than 81% since 2010 for offences under section 4. According to the government, there were 2,440 people sleeping rough in Autumn 2021, in 2010 that number was lower at 1,770. So, either the government have gotten better at looking after and housing rough sleepers, they do seem to be spending a lot of money on them (£640m a year), or they have relaxed the enforcement of laws dramatically. I’m going with the latter. I will write more about this soon.
£640 million a year is supposedly to provide 14,000 beds and pay for 3000 staff. Maths is not my strong point, but using my trustee calculator, 3000 staff on a salary of £30,000 a year each, equals £93m. The average daily rate for a hotel room in Britain is around £112, multiply that by 365 days and you get around £40,000 a year per person, of course, there will be families and couples etc but this is only a rough estimate. Multiply the £40k a year by 14,000 beds and you get £572m. Combined, that comes to around £665m, more than the government has allocated but there are a number of other issues to solve. The most concerning is housing homeless people who as previously stated are often violent, mentally unwell drug addicts, in hotels used by the general public. The government are already struggling to find places to house the massive number of illegal migrants. But it is not just the hotel goers and tourists that will be impacted, it will be areas in which significant homeless populations will be held, impacting the people that live there. The Conservative Party are spending more than £2bn a year looking after illegal migrants, now they are spending £640m to look after vagrants, bringing their drugs and crime to your area soon.
But the Vagrancy Act came under attack by various activists groups, the Labour Party and some in the Conservative Party, as such, its repeal was voted for earlier this year, backed by the government, in its apparently ‘FASCIST!!!!‘ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Its repeal has not yet come into place, and the date is still yet to be set, but really, it doesn’t matter, the act was hardly enforced anyway and the offences it details have been de-facto decriminalised, like many crimes in Britain. The ruling class are clear in their intentions, they don’t care if your town or city is enamoured with beggars and violent drunk homeless.
However, it’s not just criminal acts that aren’t being enforced, it’s our immigration laws also. Why are more than half of London’s rough sleepers foreign, and why haven’t they been deported? You can thank our wonderful NGOs and legal system for that. You may remember the story in 2019 of the Mayfair migrant camp, consisting of Bulgarian and Romanian migrants camped on Park Lane, contributing to a crime wave in the area. They had been able to resist deportation thanks to a High Court ruling made in 2017 that decided it was unlawful under EU law to deport rough sleepers who are EU citizens. The case was brought by the Public Interest Law Unit and North East London Migrant Action. Because we all know it’s high on the public interest ladder to allow homeless people to remain in your country. Currently, EU migrants who arrived before the 31st of December 2020, and those who have EU Settlement status are immune from deportation for rough sleeping, but with Britain out of the EU, the rule was revived for those who do not fit that criteria.
Again, like the Vagrancy Act, it doesn’t really matter because our immigration laws are not being enforced. In the year ending March 2022, Britain forcibly deported 3,231 people, around 15,000 were deported in 2012. More than 100 councils across Britain have signed up to a pledge to ‘Support Not Deport’ foreign homeless with Bristol Council Labour Cabinet member, Councillor Tom Renhard saying that Bristol is a ‘city of sanctuary’. But when the Home Office declare this rule will be used ‘sparingly‘, Mr Renhard shouldn’t worry, the first person to be deported under this rule won’t be on a plane till the middle of this decade if the Home Offices’ previous record is anything to go by.
Whilst people in Britain, who work hard, pay their taxes, have children and look after themselves and their families are struggling, the Conservative Party is actively turning Britain into a third-world nation. In tandem with the Labour party and various charities and NGOs, soon enough, towards the end of this decade, you won’t be able nor will you want to walk through certain areas of your town or city.
Well-funded, and well-determined people have come together to elevate the interest of vagrants, criminals and illegal migrants above the interests, concerns and safety of law-abiding British citizens. The force of the state increasingly comes down on those who do not deserve it, whilst protecting those who deserve much harsher treatment. The British ruling classes’ priorities could not be clearer, you and your family don’t matter. The well-being of homeless drug addicts and criminals takes precedence over the well-being of your family.
Take Mr Nabil Abdullah for example, who came to Britain in 2014 as a ‘refugee’ and since then has racked up a string of 31 convictions, with a 32nd committed when he attacked a man with a brick whilst in possession of a knife. When he committed this assault he was homeless and already subject to a deportation order, he is still yet to be removed. How great is our immigration system! I will write more on this issue soon also.
It’s not shocking that this is happening in our country, politicians are clear in their motives, they squeeze and squeeze the working and middle classes whilst allowing vagrants to destroy wherever and whenever they see fit. Bad behaviour and illegal behaviour is rewarded, a blind eye is turned, and bad people do not face the consequences of their actions.
Whilst Britain isn’t quite slum infested yet, don’t be surprised if they start appearing sooner than you think.