The tent clearances

FRESH from being booted out of his own party’s conference for heckling Suella Braverman – that Queen of the Culture wars who is surely a shoo-in for a talk show on GB News should she want one – Andrew Boff is back in the more sedate surrounds of his favoured stomping ground, the London Assembly.

Indeed, yesterday you could find the long-serving Tory on his feet in the main chamber (Harrington’s most loyal readers will know this place as the “Ultra Low Efficiency Zone”) and hear him asking London mayor Sadiq Khan how Labour types could be so critical of Braverman’s bravado on homelessness and her desire to stop people handing out tents to rough sleepers, but not feel the same revulsion for Labour-run Camden Council.

The neighbouring authority, after all, was caught up this week in an operation to flatten tents close to Tottenham Court Road, and this just as every Labour councillor in London was taking it in turns to source more adjectives to describe Ms Braverman, the now former home secretary.

Over the road, vulnerable men and women, some in tears, watched as the shelters were tossed into a rubbish truck.

Mr Khan yesterday responded in the only appropriate way, by telling The Boff that he was appalled at the video.

It’s easy to draw parallels with this incident and Ms Braver­man’s heartless­ness but at least Camden’s council leader Georgia Gould broke off her maternity leave to apologise at a public meeting last night – her new baby strapped into a sling in front of her as she did – and Mr Khan too made no attempt to conjure up some wordy excuse for what has happened.

Maybe that’s the difference. After her recent comments, would Ms Braverman be similarly appalled and apologetic by this shameful episode, or would she be ordering the next round of vans to blast through her small tents crisis?

More interesting perhaps is how the crushed shelters have escalated into a national story. Not just a Camden New Journal exclusive, it has bounced around Fleet Street.

It’s interesting because this isn’t the first time this has happened in the United Kingdom at all. Outreach workers and groups like Streets Kitchen know tents are ripped up and confiscated up and down the country for spurious reasons every week; mainly because somebody somewhere decides they do not want to walk past a living illustration of our stark inequality.

In fact, there will surely have been people in local authorities in lots of areas who saw the national coverage of the tent clearances this week and mumbled to themselves… haven’t we done this before.

Maybe even one not too far from where you are reading this newspaper.

We’ve seen spikes added to doorways and street furniture specifically designed to make a bench impossible to sleep on. A hostile environment has expanded with hardly a peep from those who can influence policy – or write for the masses about it.

Of course, anything that happens in Camden is always amplified beyond how would if the same thing was happening in [insert the name of any town outside of London].

And that’s a problem. Homelessness is only ever really a national story if a) it’s happening in rich London or b) something outrageous is caught on a cameraphone and posted on social media in a way which can be translated into a quick and easily shared web story.

You see, it wasn’t apparently a national story that 15 people were so desperate that they’ve spent a year clinging to a hospital’s back end air-conditioning system for warmth. Many people will now only know they were there all that time because of the awful way they have been treated this week. A scandal untold.

Anything deeper than a shock horror video, or anything aiming to start a considered debate about how to actually end homelessness won’t score high enough on the web metrics to be seen.

Our newspapers in this office have resolutely reported on the issue for years now and Harrington pays particular tribute to reporters Isabelle Stanley and Frankie Lister-Fell for their compassionate journalism, but they were often pressing on when nobody wanted to listen.

Sadiq Khan

Now a viral clip has provided a brief window to try and have that conversation. If that’s the only way, so be it – but it must not be wasted.

At the same meeting that Georgia Gould was apologising at last night, other Labour councillors were bemoaning the Right to Buy policy for depleting affordable housing stocks, and insisting so much more could be done if the Conservative govern­ments of the past 13 years had not scissored local council budgets.

Sadly, such comments from the Labour camp rarely move on to the next obvious sentence, which surely should be: So if we win power next year, we’ll end Right to Buy and pledge millions into new council homes to get people off the streets.

As we know, none of this has been pledged by Keir Starmer so far, nor his would-be chancellor Rachel Reeves, that voracious reader of Wikipedia. No, we haven’t forgotten!

Mr Khan could make it front and centre of his mayoral election campaign next year: how about less hardly-used second homes in London and properties lost to Airbnb, and more long-term empty buildings being used to help.

It won’t be, but the video of the tent clearances should be a watershed moment.

The Labour ranks should see how horrified people are about the way rough sleepers have been treated here and understand that voters might – might – just be interested in policies that actually help people on the streets rather than ones that persecute them.

It may cost a little more than the wondrous strategy of not doing much, but how long can rows of sleeping bags in this city and others not be a daily topic of conversation for all of us?

Rather than copying her rhetoric, doing the exact opposite of anything Suella Braverman suggests could be the right starting point. Then move upwards from there.