Empowering the Homeless

by Sarah Fuller

As a guest at the Giuseppe Conlon House, I find homelessness depressingly damaging. The population of refugees, asylum seekers with the right of an appeal, the homeless rural population and those not eligible for housing benefits seems to be missing from the official government figures and data used to determine the overall number of those who are really homeless.

When I found myself admitted into Giuseppe Conlon House, it was clear that, as a homeless person who is type 2 diabetic, it was not just a lack of decent housing that was the problem. There remained the responsibility of family, physical and mental wellbeing, relationship breakdown, immigration, leaving my family, and the bereavement that followed.

I was in the situation of not knowing what to do, who to turn to and how to deal with these serious stressors. My feelings of depression, unhappiness, and disappointment were so severe, I became a perpetual seeker of help. The question remained what kind of help.

The clinical depression I was going through contributed to low moods with difficulty sleeping, change in appetite, hopelessness, pessimism

, and even thoughts of suicide. The disorders and anxieties I have mentioned above are and have been a limiting factor for me in achieving my full potential. Being homeless, without a decent roof over my head, is a serious contributing matter in all this anxious neurosis.

My GP was helpful in one respect: how to feel less lonely. She explained to me that being unwanted is the worst disease that any human being can experience. And that loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important. She suggested I tackle my lonely lifestyle first. She suggested examples like having time for voluntary work: ever since she introduced me to Groundswell, a national charity that supports homeless people, I’ve tried to take more control of my life. I have greater influence on the services I use and aim to play a full role within the community.

I have tried most of the therapies and suggestions put forward by the surgery, such as massage and aromatherapy, attending a theology group, and therapeutic sessions for those who have been victims of persecution and domestic violence. Not to forget chess, puzzles, crosswords or scrabble that I enjoy playing as well. I tried all the above to deal with loneliness.

But I realised that loneliness doesn’t mean social isolation. This was the first lesson that I learnt. As I believe I’m generally a nice and kind person. This is based on the feedback I have received, from people of all walks of life with whom I’ve happened to interact. I have to admit it is not just easy or simple to get on with everyone. Not because I don’t want to get on with people but sometimes due to issues and things beyond my reasoning, I try to avoid fellows who invade my privacy that can cause despair. This is not to say intrusions are unwelcome. I like intrusions that are necessary for health.

It was through focusing on these activities, that I found empowerment and self awareness, and therefore the ability to treat my mental health issues and also address the serious barriers to finding a home.

Giuseppe Conlon House is for me an emergency solution. It has alleviated the problem of not knowing where to turn. Here, I’m no longer facing the diseases and symptoms that come with homelessness. For instance diarrhoea, which may pass as a minor inconvenience to the well-housed, can present a major hurdle for a homeless person.

There remains the task of uplifting my soul, establishing a hopeful future. And getting out of homelessness. At the moment my situation is: firstly continuing with what works for me, and secondly continuing at Giuseppe Conlon House. Both these require a process of adapting to changing environments, to growing up and ageing, to healing when damaged, to suffering. Lastly, tackling my homelessness embraces the future and so includes anguish and the inner resources needed to live with it. This aloneness is an aspect of the human condition, and out of it grows my creativity.

The Age of Insecurity

Keir Starmer with British Troops, Stefan Rousseau/PA

Members of the new Government have told us several times over the last few months that we have entered an “age of insecurity”. Keir Starmer used the phrase in June, as he was declaring his willingness to kill millions in nuclear strikes under unspecified circumstances, and his commitment to a huge increase in British military spending, to 2.5% of GDP. Rachel Reeves has used the phrase several times by way of diagnosing an illness for which her “securonomics” is the cure. The illness consists in political instability resulting in a lack of long-term investment; the cure consists in the creation of a new National Wealth Fund, which will invest £7.3 billion of public money into private businesses over the next five years, and in a refusal to substantially raise taxes or public spending, carrying on in all but name the policy of austerity which has caused so much needless suffering. And on the same theme, Labour’s manifesto proclaims an “age of insecurity” which necessitates “a return to the foundations of good government: national security, secure borders, and economic stability”, and an “enduring partnership” of the state with private business. As I write this the new Government seems intent on following these promises through – Keir Starmer is telling the leaders of NATO about the urgency of increasing military spending, while his ministers insist there is no prospect of increasing public spending even to the minimal degree of ending the eugenicist two-child benefit cap.

Of course, many people in the UK are living in insecurity, and have been for many years: a third of households with people of working-age have less than £1000 in savings; several thousand people sleep rough each night; around a million undocumented immigrants live and work in this country with no employment protections, no ability to legally rent, and no access to public funds. And, of course, we all live with global insecurity, with a dozen or so competing nuclear-armed states expressing their willingness to slaughter each other’s populations given sufficient provocation; with ongoing wars fuelled by the arms industry which Labour continues to champion; with climate change which Labour promises to do far too little to address; with around 120 million displaced people in the world whom Labour is committed to keeping out of our wealthy nation. Obviously, this is not the sort of insecurity which Starmer and Reeves are talking about. Labour has proposed – and the country has largely accepted – security for those who matter from the point of view of the British state. Labour’s “national security” will be achieved by subsidising a war of attrition in Ukraine, fought by conscripts and reducing still greater sections of the country to rubble, to end in a settlement almost certain to be no better for Ukrainians than that which could have been negotiated before the war began; and by a strengthened policy of nuclear deterrence which makes manifest a belief in the ultimate non-existence of the value of human life. Labour’s “economic stability” will involve propping up with public funds the conditions in which private capital can continue to flourish, even at the expense of those in genuine economic insecurity.

Labour have said very little about what the commitment to “border security” will involve in practice, but what they have said is deserving of scrutiny. In their manifesto they praise the Homes for Ukraine scheme, the Hong Kong humanitarian visas, and the tiny, strictly limited, and now defunct Syrian resettlement program, while committing to the prevention of arrivals by small boat. Presumably in Labour’s ideal world they would allow in only carefully selected, relatively affluent refugees and only those conveniently fleeing from a geopolitical rival, while preventing anyone else from reaching Britain by some means yet to be determined. We know that, in the real world, no such thing will happen. The people most desperately in need of refuge will rarely be those to whom it is most convenient to give it, and apart from that economic desperation is already enough of a driver by itself to make men, women and children make lethally dangerous crossings of the Sahara and the Mediterranean to get here. Yvette Cooper’s vaunted Border Security Command will not be able to fulfil its much-repeated mandate to “Smash the Gangs”, because it will do nothing that British and French security forces are not already doing with little success. But the focus on traffickers as drivers of irregular migration is intended to obfuscate the reality that people come to Britain in small boats because of political, economic and climactic problems in their home countries to which Labour has no solution. The question is not whether or not we want people to come here, because they are going to keep coming regardless. The question is whether we treat them as human beings once they’re here.

There is no compelling reason to be optimistic about the new Government’s answer. They have refused to commit to the opening of any safe, legal routes to asylum, despite this being the only means of claiming asylum they would theoretically be willing to accept. Nothing has been said about restoring to asylum seekers the right to work which the last Labour government took from them; nothing has been said about reporting conditions. The Rwanda plan has been abandoned, not on grounds of its inhumanity but because it would not deport people quickly or efficiently enough. Nothing has been said suggestive of anything except a continuation of the hostile environment. The obsessive focus on “smashing” traffickers is particularly concerning given that, in the face of the extreme difficulty of actually catching traffickers, the last Government tended to scapegoat refugees themselves, charging anyone who happened to have their hand on the tiller at any point in crossing with “facilitating illegal arrival”, providing minimal legal representation, and imposing custodial sentences long enough to preclude their ever being granted asylum. The plan to invest the new force with “counter-terrorism style powers” is hardly suggestive of any greater commitment to due process or to justice.

Dorothy Day asked long ago: “what right has any one of us to have security when God’s poor are suffering?” If you have any money, if you are white, if you are a British citizen, the new Government intends to give you a false sense of security at the expense of the poor, of migrants, and of anyone else it can get away with robbing. We have to reject such security as the Government is offering us. Those of us who are Christians know where we are obliged to place our loyalties – in those who are hungry, thirsty, unclothed, unhoused, or strangers in a strange land. If we can take him at his word, to follow Jesus is to give up your cloak, your house, your food, your time, all your possessions, and your social standing. He certainly expects us to give up our nuclear deterrent and our border. In an age of insecurity, we try to follow him as best as we are able.

Pacifism

A repost of Dorothy Day’s 1936 Catholic Worker editorial on pacifism

'Christ breaks the rifle', Otto Pankok, 1950

The Catholic Worker is sincerely a pacifist paper.

We oppose class war and class hatred, even while we stand opposed to injustice and greed. Our fight is not “with flesh and blood but principalities and powers.”

We oppose also imperialist war.

We oppose, moreover, preparedness for war, a preparedness which is going on now on an unprecedented scale and which will undoubtedly lead to war. The Holy Father Pope Pius XI said, in a pastoral letter in 1929:

“And since the unbridled race for armaments is on the one hand the effect of the rivalry among nations and on the other cause of the withdrawal of enormous sums from the public wealth and hence not the smallest of contributors to the current extraordinary crisis. We cannot refrain from renewing on this subject the wise admonitions of our predecessors which thus far have not been heard.

“We exhort you all, Venerable Brethren, that by all the means at your disposal, both by preaching and by the press, you seek to illumine minds and open hearts on this matter, according to the solid dictates of right reason and of the Christian law.”

“Why not prepare for peace?”

1. Let us think now what it means to be neutral in fact as well as in name.

2. American bankers must not lend money to nations at war.

3. We must renounce neutral rights at sea.

   
   

These three points are made by Herbert Agar in “Land of the Free.” Neutrality “in fact,” he says, could be practiced on by either saint or cynic.

In fact, it would mean that either we must not pass judgments (upholding a positive stand for peace instead) or else in condemning Italy, also to condemn Ethiopia for resisting. To do this one would indeed have to be either saint or cynic.

The cynic would say, “It is none of my business.”

The Saint would say, and perhaps he would be a very wise man in saying it, “The conquered conquers in the end. Christ was overcome and He overcame. There was His ostensible failure on the Cross, yet He rose triumphant and Christianity spread over the world. The Christian thing to do would be not to resist, but when anyone asked for one’s coat, to give up one’s cloak besides. As Peter Maurin pointed out in the last instance, Australia could be given up to Japanese expansion for instance, if England objected on”noble” grounds for Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. But recognizing that the majority of people are not Saints; that they are swift to wrath, to resist aggression (when they are not the aggressors), then we can only insist ceaselessly that even when the people are taking sides mentally they must keep out, they must not participate in “a War to end War.”

In the last war we helped to impose an unjust peace, even if we grant that we sincerely thought we were engaged in a noble crusade and were throwing our support on the right side in the conflict. We were influenced to this way of thinking not only by deliberate propaganda, but also by the muddle-headedness of pacifists who were not truly “peace-lovers.”

Example Again

If we are calling upon nations to disarm, we must be brave enough and courageous enough to set the example.

Nations can live at home. That is the title of a recent book, and many surveys are being made at present to find out how many nations can do without trade and “live at home.”

If we abandoned our neutral rights at sea, we would still have a surplus of food and material goods with which to help feed nations which had been made gaunt by war. We are not suggesting this as a business note but as a reminder of Christian Charity.

Do we believe we help any country by participating in an evil in which they are engaged? We rather help them by maintaining our own peace. It takes a man of heroic stature to be a pacifist and we urge our readers to consider and study pacifism and disarmament in this light. A pacifist who is willing to endure the scorn of the unthinking mob, the ignominy of jail, the pain of stripes and the threat of death, cannot be lightly dismissed as a coward afraid of physical pain.

A pacifist even now must be prepared for the opposition of the next mob who thinks violence is bravery. The pacifist in the next war must be ready for martyrdom.

We call upon youth to prepare!