Access to food and shelter a basic right
IN recent years we have become increasingly desensitised to the fact that in Britain, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, people find a shop doorway, a deserted underpass or a quiet corner in a park and bed down for the night.
We hear about rough sleeping and homelessness so much now that it has almost become accepted as normal, with many of us desensitised to what it really means to sleep out in the elements without a roof over our heads.
Mass unemployment caused by Covid-19 could be the catalyst that forces our Government to build swathes of council housing. Perhaps the million council homes promised in Jeremy Corbyn’s
Labour manifesto will be delivered, just under the leadership of Boris Johnson, rather than Corbyn?
While I am horrified that homelessness and rough sleeping are part of normal public discourse, what frightens me even more is the increasingly frequent reports of children going hungry that we see in the media.
Let’s travel 1,400 miles to
Minsk, capital of Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship. This country boasts Europe’s cleanest streets with workers employed by the government to keep the place tidy and, more importantly, has the lowest poverty rate in Europe.
While human rights records are something to be less proud of, to say the least in Belarus, isn’t access to food and shelter one of the most basic of human rights? A right which many people in Britain, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, are denied? I am not for a second suggesting that Boris Johnson attempts to emulate Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko but there are most certainly lessons that can be learned. The current strategy of outsourcing and awarding contracts to friends of the Conservative party does not seem to be the way to do it, however, investing in state infrastructure and public services does work and it is this “mixed economy” approach which led to the NHS being created as part of the welfare state. Oh how proud I would be if post Brexit Britain became a country which had eradicated poverty and child hunger!
Ollie Fortune Montpelier, Bristol