Conservatives: The Wrath of the Nothing
A homeless man in Leicester
In Leicester, the council have just made some pivotal decisions on whether they will continue to provide funding for single homeless people. What little support there was for people who are not disabled or classed as “vulnerable” is now being decimated.
So, if you find yourself in a position where your wife wants you out and you think it’s best to leave the house for your kids – then it’s park bench for you, mate. If your business burns out because nobody is spending any money – that National Insurance you paid over the years won’t help you now, pal. If your house, haunted by hiked-up mortgages and binding bills, falls into the bank of oblivion then sorry buddy – I hope the gutter is warm, because there’s no way out from there.
With government cuts and parties intent on snidely selling off chunks of our public services; all our parliamentary decisions finalised by people we didn’t elect but who inherited silver spoons up their backsides and a billion in their back-pocket; and the Daily Mail informing a mass proportion of the oblivious population, it’s no wonder every system we have in place here is crumbling before our very eyes.
I can’t help but think of 80′s children’s classic, The Never-Ending Story. What is happening to Britain is reminiscent of “The Nothing” that swallows the land of Fantasia, leaving a black, gaping abyss in its wake.
In the homeless hostel I live in, I am seeing people get sucked into holes. One minute they are there, the next they are gone, sometimes with no explanation. They are left to wander in the dark as weary tumble-weed, gathering society’s dust, living like rats in sewers of shame as strangers pass them by, calling them names that make them feel like they deserve this. When it comes to hostel beds, being disabled is a blessing: I will be one of the last to walk the plank.
Last night a man was almost on his knees at the reception desk, fleeing like a refugee from London, where the Class War had carved his helpless descent into joblessness and homelessness.
“They told me to leave London,” he said. “Get out, they told me, go to another city. We can’t help you here, there are too many people – there’s nothing we can do.”
Flee, people, Flee. Swarm in your hoards to the Ghettos, to the “working class” towns and away from our big white houses: you are not welcome here. The city of London tremors with the weight of greed. Boris Johnson combs out the caked-on flakes of skin from his scalp and blows them to the dust: “here you go, homeless – there’s plenty of protein in that”.
Come and see Leicester, City of Culture. Come and see our hollow shop-windows, our boarded-up factories; our hopeless youth. We will stare up at you from the shadows with our sad eyes beaming like bats’, beacons of the ache of betrayal, hoping that we bore into your soul the way you cut into ours when you took away everything; when you blighted our future. We will not let you forget.
Fantasia was built on dreams, and the moral of The Never-Ending Story was that if we believe in our dreams, even the most damaged of structures can be rebuilt. I hope we, as British People, can conquer The Nothing and preserve the system our grandparents broke their backs building for us after the war; one that was meant to ensure future generations would not have to suffer poverty, famine and disease ever again.
So what of the future? The stuffy summer is smothered with discontent. We stand like brittle bracken against a raging storm but we are human beings; sometimes all we have left to do is hope.
Chloe Camarthan
