I was homeless once — Corbyn doesn't get the problem

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.

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.

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