A Mess of "Potage"

I stood amazed, during the week, at the proposal by Westminster Council to ban the “soup run” to homeless people in their area. Of course, on one level, we should not be surprised at a bunch of self-serving, fat burghers and Pharisees have concocted such an idea. They have “form” in that respect, after all. Was it not Westminster Council that banned the run in their hallowed precincts at Christmas the other year? Unbelievably, on that occasion, it was supported by the editor of “The Big Issue” and I wrote to him and told him he was an idiot. He never replied. Perhaps he already knew.

To the councillors of Westminster, it would seem that the homeless are a sort of wilful and tiresome irritation, so obsessed with the taste of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato that they are willing to leave their homes and their jobs, hitch-hike to London, and sleep rough in a doorway in Covent Garden just for a sniff of the stuff. It is an indicator of just how far those set in authority over us take us for mugs, that this kind of bollocks is actually served up as some sort of justification for the ban.

The truth, I suspect, lies nearer to the fact that rich people who live in Westminster don’t like seeing poor and homeless people as they go about their daily social round. It grates on the residual node of what used to be their shame gene, before they had it surgically removed. It reminds them of the fundamental injustice of their continued existence, compared to the people in our society who are really struggling. Johann Hari, writing tellingly about this in The Independent, points to the distant view of Canary Wharf and all its glittering towers, from the perspective of the homeless who “live” – or rather, exist – in Covent Garden.

Anyway, I have written to the Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asking her what she intends to do about the homeless, because you can’t ban them from existing. Now that no one will feed them, will they be left, in some cases no doubt, to starve in the gutter? I await the reply (if any) with interest. Because, as it says in my Bible, if they cared to look, “the poor are always with us”.

And if you could make horrible nasty things vanish just by banning them, someone would have banned Westminster Council a long time ago.