Homelessness – it is one of the great liberal guilt trips of our age: the dark centre of our supposedly prosperous western world, and one that we see every day on the streets of Britain. What then, if anything, can be done about such a stain on our consciousness? The answer that we seem to have settled on is to defer the problem, to house our hopes for the help of these unfortunates in The Big Issue, a magazine that faces us every time we buy it with a simple statement: this is a big issue, and one that needs to be dealt with.
Is this, though, actually the answer to the problem? Spending time around those who sell The Big Issue, the whole problem suddenly seems rather less simple than it does from the outside. The Big Issue is an important lifeline for a great many of those who sell it. Those I spoke to often said how important it was to get the income from the magazine in order to eat, find shelter, and also – crucially – gain some kind of self-respect. Yet it is also something else, something both more and less than this.
It was Darren, a Big Issue seller whom I met outside the Sainsbury’s in Westgate, who first pointed out this additional dimension. Smartly dressed in a shirt, he was one of the few sellers who was willing to take half an hour out of his day to have a discussion with me. (More often, I was told that I could stand nearby for a short time and watch, but very few wished to talk for more than five minutes once I had made a purchase.) What Darren wished to highlight was not how hard life is for The Big Issue sellers, but the way society uses it to deal with its own problems. He agreed that it was a lifeline for many who sold it, but the reality for him was that many sellers have deeper underlying problems – drugs and drink primarily – and that without The Big Issue the only way to deal with these problems would be to commit crimes. For Darren, The Big Issue was therefore a way of dealing with the potential of some of these people to commit minor crimes. How much easier it is to give these potential prisoners a Big Issue to sell at no cost to the state than to deal with them in the justice system.
Darren’s perspective may well have sprung from his background. He had come to Oxford only recently and had held jobs in the past. (Interestingly, not many used the word ‘job’ to describe what they were doing by selling The Big Issue.) In contrast, another seller said that he had been on the street since the age of nineteen, and was now in his thirties. For him selling The Big Issue had become a way of life, and being homeless was part of his existence that would be hard to shake. I was told another story of a man who slept outside his council house when he was given one because he was so used to being on the street. While this story may be more myth than truth – sometimes it was hard to tell – the very fact it was told reveals something of the attitude of many of those who live and work on the streets.
What struck me most, however, about those who sold The Big Issue was the loss of dignity that followed. As already mentioned, Darren viewed it as just another job, and indeed said that his tent by a lake outside of Oxford was rather nicer than many of those he knew with houses. The physical discomfort of life on the street is of course also awful, but standing for just half an hour with one seller on Queen Street made me also see the mental horrors of the position. Seeing people stream by with disdain; one person actually told him to ‘fuck off and get a job’. All this wore me down – and I wasn’t the one taking the abuse – and made me understand why he had been so reluctant to let me stand with him, why he wouldn’t even give me his name, preferring instead to try and get me to buy more issues.
All of this, of course, needs to be taken with caution. These people are not saints, and like many figures in the canon of the disadvantaged, the individuals are often some way from the archetype. There were those for example who used Big Issue selling as a way of begging, asking for extra change after selling an issue or when someone turned them down. It was also clear that many would deliberately make themselves look more pathetic than necessary. On the other hand, is this any different from ‘dressing-up’ for any job? Doesn’t everyone look for that little bit extra where possible?
What my brief encounter with the homeless made me see was more and less than I anticipated. I saw how degrading it could be, how the long hours of standing in all weather – I was fortunate enough to have bright sunshine on the day I spent out – could be physically uncomfortable, that many of the people I met had serious problems talking with people on a personal level and had clearly had tough backgrounds.
What I also saw, however, was that the moral guilt of the middle class is too simple an answer to such a complex problem. The slogan of The Big Issue is ‘A Hand Up Not A Handout’, and the aim of making people work to earn money is a noble one. The reality is nonetheless that those living on the street are those left behind by our society, and buying a single Big Issue each week is not the answer to this problem. In fact, we should all do more, not because homelessness is a wrong for which we all bear responsibility, but because these people are individuals – both good and bad.
