Has our shocking homeless crisis taken us back to wartime Britain?
Dina has it all worked out. The mother-ofsix, who lives alone in a makeshift shelter in the centre of Manchester next to a mobile police unit, knows who is behind Britain’s drugs epidemic: the Government.
Politicians are flooding the streets, she says, with crack, spice and heroin to control rebellious citizens — the ones too independent to be trapped in the rat race.
it’s a theory that was popular at the height of the hippie era, the days of Jimi Hendrix and Vietnam War protests.
Dina seems like a child of the Sixties in other ways: she refers to her shelter as a ‘beautiful boudoir’ and claims she was once a model, who did campaigns for Debenhams and M&S.
adventurer and ex- army captain Ed Stafford met her as he spent 60 Days On The Streets (C4), finding out what it was like to live rough with junkies, drunks and the homeless.
Ed could cope with scavenging in bins for his dinner, washing in the toilets of coffee bars, taking abuse from strangers and getting moved on by police.
What proved too much was Dina’s habit of sleeping late, curled up on her mattress while Manchester was on its way to work. Looks like Ed is a morning person.
The 43-year-old, who once walked the length of the amazon, left his wife, toddler and two dogs at their rural Leicestershire home to find out what it’s like to have no roof.
More people are homeless in Britain, he said, than at any time since World War ii.
What he found horrified him. ‘i’ve been to Delhi, Bombay, Kinshasa,’ he said, ‘but Manchester . . . when it comes to human excrement in the streets i’ve never seen anything like it. it’s disgusting.’
The common complaint is that most people walk right by the homeless and fail to see them.
i don’t think that’s true. We see the degradation, we deplore it and then we have to put it out of our minds. Either way, it’s getting worse, and yet this sort of documentary is rare.
That’s partly because a film like this can offer no simple answers. Ed befriended an articulate man named Geoff, a politely diligent beggar who said he was desperate to find a hostel for the night.
Geoff, 26, had been evicted from his flat after a bout of mental illness ended in a suicide attempt. it was a pitiful story. Only slowly did we realise that, on a good night, Geoff was making about £40 an hour by politely asking passers-by for money — and then spending it on crack and heroin.
He’d been doing drugs since he was 13. There are more moral complications in that story than we can digest in just one hour.
an even more complex hour was served up in Shadow Commander: Iran’s Military Mastermind ( BBC2), with a blizzard of news footage from 40 years of war reports telling the story of warlord Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani has been the enemy, the ally and then the enemy again of the West — before finally becoming a crucial ally in the war against isis.
The voiceover called Soleimani ‘ the Darth Vader of the Middle East’.
But his followers regard him as a holy man. His charisma in film clips was palpable — Hollywood looks with Churchillian swagger. He’s even the star of a video wargame in iran.
The potted history and assessment of his power was absorbingly informative.
But as to whose side Soleimani was on at any given moment . . . i couldn’t even guess.