To think a lot of people don't realise how bad public services have become.

[GaIadriel]

Was talking to my partner earlier and mentioned the number of homeless men nowadays in the city centre (many sleep under the viaduct next to our jobsite). He said that men at risk of imminent homelessness will often be provided with nothing more than a sleeping bag and a tent if they approach our local council.

Gotta say I'm pretty shocked at this! I always thought you'd be placed in temporary accommodation like a hostel. Not somewhere particularly nice but a far cry from a tent by the ringroad. I assumed it was drug issues that prevented most of these guys from accessing shelter. They can often make a fair bit begging at the traffic lights which sadly facilitates their addictions - one guy who sleeps near our site claims to make around £140 a day and I believe him.

Having googled it, it seems that this isn't a specific policy of councils but their statutory duty is to 'assess homeless applicants and provide emergency accommodation only if they meet specific priority need criteria, such as having dependent children, vulnerability due to health issues, or fleeing domestic abuse.' So realistically most blokes won't meet this criteria. Another issue seems to be that there's often a huge delay in processing, meaning significant waiting periods.

Working in the construction sector, I work with a lot of young self employed guys. They're mostly young working class guys who earn decent salaries for the most part but I doubt many have income protection insurance or significant savings that could cover months worth of rent in the event of a workplace injury - even a broken ankle could be debilitating in a lot of onsite jobs. I'd imagine a lot of people wouldn't be able to support themselves for months without an income tbf.

I don't even know if I'd qualify as priority as despite being a woman I don't have any kids or serious health issues, but I'd hate to be doing my current job as a bloke. Makes me wonder if things like this are part of what drives the strong support for Reform amongst working class men. A middle class woman with kids is much more likely to be seen as priority, as are women fleeing DV.

I can absolutely see why men who've grafted 10-12 hours a day and paid their taxes for years would be enraged to be given a tent when there's a hotel over the road full of people who've come here illegally and never paid a penny into the system, many of whom are young blokes. Obv not the fault of the asylum seekers but it's a pretty shocking reality.

Apparently I'm being unreasonable. 🤣 I was aware tbf that touching on Reform's popularity and mentioning that men experience their own problems are both taboo subjects for many on here.

There's an old saying I often find myself thinking about these days, when I see the potholes that don't get repaired, the bins not emptied for weeks, and the hospital corridors full of very sick people....
“Roman citizens didn’t know Rome fell, they just noticed the roads and bridges stop being repaired”

We are quickly becoming the Roman citizens in this scenario I fear.

That's a good point. I think many of us are relatively shielded from the reality in our day to day lives.

On a bit of a tangent, I remember a pothole vigilante about a decade ago who gained some notoriety. He was dubbed 'Wanksy' because he was going out at night with a spray can and drawing enormous penises around potholes. The consensus was that this seemed to vastly improve the turnaround in getting them filled in, but the council issued an indignant statement about how 'acts of vandalism do not influence our maintenance schedule and anybody caught doing so will be reported to the police'.

Absolute legend if you ask me. 😆

Yes and when the Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain, they found the Romans to have become fat lazy and weak, and unable to defend themselves.

I work in a public library in Canada, and a few years ago there was a shelter near us. They closed in the day so many of the people there, who were mostly men, would spend the day at the library. Often on the computers, reading the paper, etc.

At the same time we were having massive immigration, even in the slightly down and out ex-mining town we are in, and every day there were newcomers in to do things like use the computers, photocopy documents, print resumes, and so on.

I always thought, this has to be a massive kick in the teeth to these men who have been looking for housing for months while sleeping and showering with 39 other guys and no place of their own to even spend their day.

And a heck of a lot of them were looking at voting for the party that was talking about restricting immigration.

This is nothing new. I can remember being shocked at the number of homeless in London in the early 1980s when I first started working up there; prior to that I'd worked fairly locally. There was cardboard city and various other places, plus a lot of people sleeping in shop doorways whom I passed on the way to work - for years.

There were charities and drop in centres, eg Cardinal Hume. Centrepoint, St Mungo's, London City Mission, the Sally Army, all of which are still going: the government at that time didn't do much, the culture at that time favouring those who help themselves.

I can't see Reform improving things, whatever they might say. In fact, in the unlikely event that they got in, I can foresee people generally being worse off, including those with health problems. Reform really don't have a clue, all they do is scapegoat the unfortunates and whip up outrage in the easily-led.

What is being done with all the taxes that we pay is the big question.

Yeah, there's certainly always been a lot of homeless people but the ones I encounter (which is a lot as I'm often driving around the city centre all day) are mostly on drugs. Although maybe it's just because that particular demographic have a need for money to support their addictions so they're more visible.

It's scary to think that a working professional with a decent income living in rental accommodation could end up in a tent. I'm actually friends with a guy (train together) who's in a fairly precarious situation. He's middle aged with a hormonal deficiency for which he has to inject testosterone. He was prescribed privately after being told for years his low sex drive/energy was likely down to depression as his hormones were in range.

He was only diagnosed around 40yo after paying to see a sexual health expert, having not been able to have sex for almost a decade. Turns out his level was 9 nmol and the GP would've prescribed had he been 8.7 nmol. Critically, the British Society for Sexual Medicine stipulates that a 'borderline' level below 12 nmol should be considered for treatment if the patient is experiencing symptoms and/or is young, which he originally was when he first got tested around 30yo, but surgeries can apparently ignore best practice and use the outdated range which a specialist almost certainly wouldn't.

He's been fine for a decade and a former GP offered to put him on the NHS as their trust uses a cutoff of 10 nmol. However, since moving GP surgery after relocating for work they want to take him off it again as they use the 8.7 nmol limit. This will introduce a severe hormonal crash as his natural production will have shut down completely due to external testosterone and the DVLA have told him he'll have to declare himself unfit for work as it constitutes a risk of public endangerment to be driving a truck in such a condition.

So if he can't afford expensive private treatment he'll be at risk of homelessness as a self employed guy with no sick pay. The NHS doesn't seem to want to know and are just focusing on the fact that he was originally 0.3 nmol above their cutoff, which is already far below the widely accepted healthy range used by modern medicine.

Ironically, he would no doubt have been deficient by now as testosterone levels drop with age and he only just scraped into the bottom of the range when he was in his early 30s. But they can only focus on the level from almost 20 years ago as it's impossible to get a natural reading now without stopping and letting natural production begin again (which can take up to a year). He'd defo qualify if he did that but can't afford to spend a whole year being unfit to work.

Like many men he should've been more proactive with his health and pushed to see somebody like a urologist from an andrology dept who would be more likely to use the updated matrix rather than the outdated NHS pharmacy cutoff which would only really apply to men who'd had testicular cancer or were seriously ill, as opposed to just having no sexual function or energy.

Its scary to see how somebody with a decade of life changing treatment behind them can suddenly have the rug completely pulled away despite the industry guidelines and the ranges of many other NHS trusts indicating a deficiency. I hope he'd find some way to pay privately if it came to that, but it's easy to see how somebody with a stable job can abruptly end up ill and living in a tent. His GP told him he'd be much more likely to be prescribed testosterone if he was a transman!

I believe a GP can prescribe hormone therapy to women but with men there's a lot more red tape. Many will want to involve an endocrinologist but the issue is that most endos deal with things like insulin resistance and usually don't have any experience in treating male hormone deficiency like a urologist often would.