I was homeless once — corbyn doesn't get the problem | thearticle

Jeremy Corbyn has disclosed that his Christmas routine includes a visit to a homeless hostel. What makes him think he’d be welcome? In 2015 I became a rough sleeper; in 2016 I was rescued by

the hostel system; in 2017 I left that hostel. On Christmas Day we were invariably visited by the patronising classes, the ones we didn’t see until the next Christmas. They were

well-intentioned, but those intentions, ultimately, were directed towards their own sense of self-regard. They are like the people who turn up at Mass on Christmas Day just so they can sing

loudly. The rest of the year they’re invisible. Some people who have too much, refuse to give it away to those who don’t, by invoking a claim that those who don’t have much deserve not to

have much. This is, of course, a deeply un-Christian tendency. The Gospel of Luke tells those of us who have two coats to give one away; but many people with several coats refuse to do so on

the grounds that the recipient doesn’t deserve it. So let’s fact check. In my own county of Wiltshire, a military one, the statistics are these: the majority of people who become street

homeless do so as a result of the cancellation of short-term private leases; the second biggest reason people are catapulted onto the street is relationship breakdown. And then we have to

consider the former military, the heroes, who have been dumped on by successive governments, despite their service. The issues around mental illness and addiction are a fairly distant

fourth. This is a very heterogeneous class of people, whose specific problems cannot, possibly, vitiate Luke’s call to alms. There is a _grammar _of homelessness. It generates its own set of

linguistic conventions. Homeless people speak to each other using a vocabulary that is opaque to those who haven’t been there. It is a condition of vulnerability which facilitates the most

unlikely friendships and allegiances. It is what the philosopher Wittgenstein called a _form of life_: unless you have absorbed its conventions you will never really understand it. It has an

awful phenomenology, but if you are lucky enough to survive it, you have been part of a fascinating subculture. And if you are unlucky enough not to survive it, the primary failure is down

to people like you and me (having been there I should give more). The ones who don’t give enough. The people who repose their sense of responsibility in the mechanisms of the state, rather

than of charity. The state cannot keep up with the requirements of this issue for the simple reason that the problem is one of spiritual impoverishment and the state is merely a machine. The

real genius of the Big Issue project is that when you buy a copy you are being drawn into a shared moral space, if only for 30 seconds. Stephen King’s _Shawshank Redemption _discloses a

resonant moral truth: that _anybody _can fall foul of the grubby contingencies of this world, and true rebellion often reduces to the ability to stretch the boundaries of your current

situation. The character Andy Dufresne does just that by absorbing the various injustices of his prison life and eventually transcending them. He requires no external help from apparently

benign prison visitors. The deep problem of homelessness is this: that this country tolerates not just divisions of wealth but of culture. The homeless are the _Shawshank _class, safely

tucked away out of sight; the rest of us are the complacent class thinking the prison governor is doing a good job. But that governor isn’t doing a good job. His intention is to crush the

spirit of those whom he has subjugated and when Andy fights back, via the Marriage of Figaro, the governor’s authority is structurally undermined. Mr Corbyn might feel that he is doing the

right thing when it comes to his promise to crash the Christmas Day of my friends. But he isn’t. To treat the homeless as some sort of supplicant class is to intensify the corrosive identity

politics of the day. We are better than that. And to be conscripted into the political agenda of this mirthless avatar of the secular age, on God’s day, is not something that any of my

friends would welcome. I speak for them with more confidence than he can claim. And they deserve your second coat.