I regularly walked past tents en route to work in Charing Cross, I never felt intimidated or threatened. I also had professional contact with these people, their stories are harrowing; mostly immigrants who were taken advantage of by UK employers predominantly in the building trade, whereby they were refused wages and/ or "housed" in squats in return for work. When they rightly challenged the legality of this, they were fired and subsequently made homeless.
Others were previously in the UK care system, young, traumatised victims of DV witnesses to polysubstance misuse within the home and poor MH. The common denominator in polysubstance misuse is trauma.
Instead of demonising those less fortunate, compassion, kindness and empathy should be shown. Trauma focused care should be the health and social care model adopted to rehabilitate the homeless, their problems are multi-factorial, re-housing is only one facet in their recovery. Access to community and residential rehab treatment in conjunction with ongoing counselling needs to be a priority, but if course funding has been decimated by Tory rule.
Suella's assertion of homelessness being a "lifestyle choice" and removing their tents is beyond cruel and will do nothing other than layer an extra trauma upon them.
She is dangerous, evil and devoid of a moral compass. She needs to be sacked and a GE called sooner rather than later. The whole Tory party is rotten to the core.
Sadly, swathes of people in England ( the only UK country of which I have experience) have been infected by the poisonous rhetoric of the current government. A rhetoric akin to Nazism.
I returned to my home country from England as I felt pushed out due to a huge increase of racism and xenophobia. This is fuelled by Braverman et al.