Homeless in Vancouver: U.K. treatment of beggars has a Roma of bigotry

Whether you can really arrest the growth of homelessness by arresting homeless people remains to be seen. But like some jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, some European countries are reacting to increasing homelessness by trying to treat it as a crime.

But there’s a genuine question why European authorities would try to tackle homelessness this way. Any willingness to resort to criminal prosecution of street people in Europe runs the risk of looking more like persecution; on both economic and ethnic grounds.

Though few Europeans want to admit it, when they talk of full-time street beggars, aka panhandlers, they tend to think of the Roma people.

Arresting beggars is a bit of a cop out

Under the headline “Arresting beggars doesn’t help anyone” Guardian newspaper columnist Suzanne Moore explains how some communities in the U.K. are increasingly resorting to the expedient of arresting beggars to clean the streets of their unsightly presence.

U.K. authorities are using the dusty provisions of a 190-year-old anti-vagrancy law.

There has been a dramatic 70 percent rise in arrests of homeless beggars this year across England and Wales under the 1824 Vagrancy Act.

In the prosperous Thames Valley region near London in southeast England, arrests under the 1824 law have increased from 20 to 92, a 360 percent jump in 12 months.

And in the county of Merseyside in northwest England, which includes the city of Liverpool, arrests of beggars in the same period rose from 60 to 291, an increase of 385 percent. On the eastern border of Merseyside, in Greater Manchester, the Guardian reports that arrests have doubled.

This is attributed to Manchester city centre, where local businesses have been encouraged to report homelessness and begging and police community support officers are trained to issue court summons to offending street people.

People convicted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act face a fine of £1,000 (CAN$1,604).

Moore’s piece speaks for the outrage of her audience—the squirming outrage of both conscience and affluence:

“As we load up for Christmas, it really would be nicer not to encounter these hopeless, zoned-out specimens. They are the cities’ human graffiti, reminding us that inequality is not some abstract notion. But is it really the job of the police to arrest them, fine them and call this ‘help’?”

She echos the public’s expectations (if not impatience) that these unfortunate people should be off the streets accessing the services designed to help them, but, she asks rhetorically, in the wake of government cuts, do the required rehab and drying-out clinics, or even basic mental healthcare, exist any more?

The self-inflicted wound of poverty

Moore ticks off some of the barriers that can stand in the way of people getting themselves off the street: poverty, substance abuse, mental health issues, and criminal convictions.

But as Moore admits, people much prefer to see the whole complicated syndrome of cause and effect simply as a self-inflicted condition.

Making people personally responsible for their poverty neatly absolves society and government policies of any blame and justifies a hard-hearted willingness to leave people to their chosen fate.

The next logical step is criminalization, which inherently implies people are making a personal choice that they are responsible for.

And society is within its rights to use the law to discourage bad behaviour.

One problem with criminalization, though, is how easily it can be misdirected away from discouraging anti-social behaviour and towards discriminating against undesirable groups.

Government can’t create jobs, just criminals

All the aforementioned barriers to getting off the street—poverty, substance abuse, mental health issues, and criminal convictions—are likewise barriers to getting and keeping legitimate employment.

Beyond panhandling, how else can a person support themselves while living on on the street in the U.K.?

England scrapped its bottle refund system 20 years ago, so surviving by collecting returnable beverage containers, like I do here in Vancouver, B.C., isn’t an option.

And two years ago it became illegal in England and Wales to pay cash for scrap metal; only cheques and direct deposit are allowed.

Even Dumpster diving can qualify as theft in England and Wales. Back in 2008, a woman was arrested and charged under the Theft Act of 1968 for going into a Dumpster and fishing out four plastic garden chairs destined for a landfill.

Clearly, an effort is being made to keep British homeless people from being able to legally support themselves.

EU membership has its drawbacks

What the United Kingdom is doing to criminalize homelessness should be seen in the context of the U.K.’s membership in the European Union and the way that membership restricts the U.K. from shutting out poor EU citizens.

The EU is a bunch of sovereign nations trying to act as one big nation for economic purposes: a United States of Europe to specifically rival the United States of America.

Naturally, member states have to give up a degree of sovereignty for the EU to have a chance of working.

It is illegal for EU member states to close their borders to citizens of other EU member states; union residents have the right to enter any member state for up to three months with a valid passport or identity card.

So prosperous EU countries can’t legally turn away citizens from the poorest EU countries.

France and Germany seem to be handling their influx of poor Europeans with good grace—the United Kingdom not so much.

Professional beggars and other euphemisms

At no point in her article does Moore refer to either professional beggars or the Roma people, who are seen as a price of EU membership that many in the U.K. no longer want to pay.

She only says the arrests, veiled as a reaction to aggressive and intimidating beggars, are really an attempt to cover up the growing number of homeless people.

She never says where many of the homeless people are coming from.

And the closest she comes to describing professional beggars is by describing the practice as “entrepreneurial, with its swapping of pitches and techniques”.

Her unwillingness to state the obvious—that the British public have become increasingly exercised over so-called professional Roma beggars—does a disservice to many international readers. But so far as her audience in the U.K. and Europe is concerned, she doesn’t have to be explicit; they know.

The very first comment on her piece by readers is all about “organised gangs of Romany beggars” And there follows a peppering of comments about “Romas”, “Romanian beggars”, “organised begging”, ” imported, aggressive professional beggars”, and “business beggars”; I read one comment about “Roma pickpockets” before I lost interest.

A story in the Telegraph newspaper from last year detailed how several Roma kicked out of the U.K. in the summer were back by the fall. Notably the story begins with “Foreign beggars”, progresses to “Romanian beggars”, and settles on "career beggars", all before the first paragraph ends.

“Merrie Olde England” is certainly suffering through an invasion of poor euphemisms, if nothing else.

To me, Moore’s failure to mention the controversy in England over Roma beggars is a “negative fact”, just like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze”. The deliberate exclusion speaks volumes.

Whether the British public are concerned and angry about Roma beggars is one thing, but saying the British authorities are beginning to crack down on street begging in an attempt to restrict the legitimate mobility of EU citizens or that they are in any way targeting a specific ethnic group would ring human rights alarm bells all over the European Union.

Better to let that sleeping dog lie.

Fear and loathing of the Roma beggars the imagination

Once widely referred to as Gypsies, the Roma or Romany people (also including the Sinti) have been the typecast as the ne’er-do-well thieving vagabonds of Europe for centuries, though, as their name suggests, they are geographically associated with Romania.

Absolutely every kind of low level crime you can imagine is being associated with the Roma people in Europe.

Shifty Roma are supposed to be always fleeing the poverty of Romania to prey on the richer parts of the European Union. They engage in all manner of criminal activity: stealing, picking pockets, dealing drugs, prostitution—you name it—up to and including panhandling. They sleep rough on the streets and live in makeshift camps. And when the police break up the squats, the authorities can’t pay them enough to go back to where they came from.

Two countries do not a trend make

Hungary made headlines in 2012 when they first tried to criminalize homelessness; by 2013, the country had succeeded in placing a ban on both Dumpster diving and sleeping outdoors near certain public places.

And now England is joining suit; using an antique vagrancy law in to clear beggars off the streets and tightening rules around scrap metal recycling to make it all but impossible for homeless people to support themselves collecting scrap metal.

Fortunately the actions of a few countries do not yet constitute a trend towards criminalizing homelessness in Europe.

The “aboriginal” in homelessness is also silent

The piece in the Guardian reminds me that homelessness closer to home has its own “dog that doesn’t bark”.

I’m referring to the way Canadians can talk and write about the problem of homelessness in Canada without ever mentioning aboriginal people—mental illness and drug addiction get far more ink.

Everyone suspects that aboriginal men and women make up a very high percentage of Canada’s homeless population (I think it’s at least 50 percent), but after all these years, aside from local counts here and there, no one actually knows and I’m not entirely convinced they want to.

If it was clear that anywhere near half of all Canadian homeless people were aboriginal, Canadian society would have to face the fact that homelessness was largely due to institutionalized racism.

As it is, Canadian society already deserves the majority of the blame for aboriginal homelessness.

We can hardly lay the old personal responsibility guilt trip on homeless aboriginal people. Aboriginals are the one group in Canadian society that has been historically and systematically denied the right of free choice.

According to the Indian Act, “Status Indians” are still legally wards of the Canadian  government, which is a lot like saying they are like children.

Which possibly explains why people prefer them to be seen and not heard about—like that dog I mentioned.