PRETTY VAGRANT

‘The League of Gentlemen’, that superb 1960 British caper movie with a delicious dollop of black comedy, highlighted the irony of how particular talents that are valued in wartime are rendered redundant once peace comes around. The bitter ex-Army officer character played by Jack Hawkins, given his cards by his superiors due to there being precious little for him to do anymore, attempts to get his own back on the establishment that abandoned him by assembling a motley crew of former war heroes whose post-war careers on Civvy Street have seen them drift aimlessly on the seedy fringes of society, gifted with skills that peacetime has no outlet for. He surmises the only outlet left for those skills is to use them for criminal means via an audacious bank raid; and all goes well up until the inevitable climax when the team is naturally foiled by the boys in blue. The film tapped into a dead-end that confronted the demobbed when returning to ‘normal life’, though this wasn’t a sensation unique to the aftermath of WWII. A rarely-mentioned side-effect of the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about by the victory of Waterloo in 1815 was the decommissioning of His Majesty’s Forces, men who suddenly had nowhere to go once their country no longer needed them to do their duty. After 20 years of battling post-Revolutionary France, a battle that necessitated a constant supply of cannon-fodder, Britain received an influx of bewildered and often mutilated men for whom there was no safety net in place.

For all the reverence in which the ruling class held Waterloo, the men that had contributed to victory in Europe were effectively left to their own devices thereafter; the sorry spectacle of maimed ex-servicemen begging on street corners and in shop doorways was a commonplace sight in the decade following the Duke of Wellington’s finest hour. By 1824, the government of the day decided to crack down on the problem not by providing homes for heroes, but by introducing the Vagrancy Act, making rough sleeping and begging a criminal offence. The problem of ‘vagrants’ had also been exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, in which large sections of the workforce had been deemed surplus to requirements via new machinery able to do their jobs quicker and cheaper. Moreover, the imposition of the Corn Laws and the Enclosures Act had had a catastrophic effect on those who worked the land, forcing the destitute from the countryside into towns as they desperately sought employment, competing for attention on English streets alongside economic migrants from Ireland and Scotland.

The criminalisation of homelessness that the 1824 Vagrancy Act instituted also included prostitution, but the Act was routinely expanded throughout the 19th century to cover a multitude of social problems, and something that was initially restricted to England and Wales encompassed the whole of the UK by 1871. The original Vagrancy Act was repealed in Scotland in 1981 and Northern Ireland repealed the section outlawing begging and vagrancy in 1990; but as far as the rest of the UK goes, it still applies. Prosecutions have increased in recent years, though a case which received substantial press coverage in 2014, concerning three homeless men arrested for taking discarded food from a skip and bins outside a branch of Iceland supermarkets in London, was dropped by the CPS; to many, it seemed to be antiquated legislation of basic meanness from a less compassionate age, punishing those whose circumstances were already so desperate they’d been forced to locate a meal in a bloody skip. At 200 years old, homeless charities argue the 1824 Vagrancy Act has outlived its usefulness and should be repealed altogether; the Government’s response has been the new Criminal Justice Bill.

You might recall that during the first phase of the pandemic there was a sudden rush to ‘protect lives’, which included providing accommodation for the nation’s rough sleepers – as though they’d never needed such help before Covid. A couple of years later, MPs voted to repeal the Vagrancy Act, with the Government delaying action in order to devise new means of ending rough sleeping once and for all; what they’ve devised gives police powers to fine (up to £2,500), move on or incarcerate anyone ‘intending’ to sleep rough, giving the ‘appearance’ of having slept rough, or emitting an ‘excessive smell’ that might suggest a lengthy detachment from home comforts. Sounds like progress, and should definitely bring to an end what Suella Braverman once referred to as ‘a lifestyle choice’! The fallout of the financial and social meltdown caused by a lockdown that was instigated and imposed by government ruined more lives than we probably yet know about, and it’s unarguable that the ramifications of that disastrous decision – one taken without any consultation with the public whatsoever, lest we forget – caused many to lose homes they’ll never regain.

The latest survey carried out by the Government into homelessness listed almost 4,000 people sleeping rough on the streets of England on just one night – a 27% increase from the year before; studies also estimate over 242,000 households are experiencing homelessness in one shape or another, from sofa-surfing to residing in temporary accommodation. So, one would think this is the ideal time for a humane interjection by the powers-that-be, yet in replacing an Act that was introduced to punish the casualties of a social crisis rather than resolve it, Rishi Sunak appears to be following in the footsteps of Lord Liverpool in 1824. 37 housing and homelessness charities have written to James Cleverly – currently Home Secretary, in case you haven’t kept up (who has?) – telling him that this legislation ‘risks stigmatising people forced to sleep on the streets and pushing them away from help’. Matt Downie, Chief Executive of Crisis, says: ‘The Government cites a moral imperative to end rough sleeping, yet these new measures will make it more difficult to do so. They will punish people for having nowhere else to go and push them further away from support. If we focus on the solutions that work – building safe and stable social housing and investing in specialist support that helps people keep their home – we can end rough sleeping. But the first and easiest thing the Home Secretary can do is listen to the concerns of these experienced organisations and remove these cruel and counterproductive measures.’

In response to this criticism, the current Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins – who has the look of the sort of nonentity handed such a post by a dying administration with no remaining heavyweights – retorted with scripted reassurances. ‘We have been very, very clear,’ she said. ‘We want to stop some of the aggressive begging that can happen around cash points, for example, but we do not and will not criminalise people who don’t have a home – absolutely not. That is not what this bill is about. We are absolutely not criminalising people who sleep on the streets…what we want to do is support them into supportive accommodation because many people who are living rough have complex needs.’ Whether or not that’s the genuine intention of this legislation, it’s difficult to accept the sincerity of such a statement merely because it’s difficult to accept anything a politician says as sincere; and I have to admit to hearing Nicola Murray, the hapless Minister that the fearsome spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker is saddled with in ‘The Thick of It’, particularly the episode where she declares she wants to ‘inspire people out of poverty’.

One can’t help but feel the wording of the proposals could have been a little better; a term such as ‘nuisance begging’, coupled with the prospect of arresting someone ‘looking like they are intending to sleep on the streets’, just has the undeniable odour of a classic Tory plan to penalise people who aren’t in a position to fight back – a last throw of the reactionary dice in a desperate bid to prove they’re still ‘the Party of Law and Order’. But even if they wooed back a few estranged old UKippers to the fold by dragooning the homeless into spanking new workhouses, the Nasty Party has still blown it; and the homeless are still without a roof over their heads.

© The Editor

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