Worst Opinion of the Week: Homelessness Isn't the Tories' Fault, It's Yours!

Story: Tory MP urges British public not to give their money to the homeless.
Reasonable take: If only the Tory government could do something about the homelessness crisis besides blaming the public for giving homeless people money.
Brain rot: "I know a 'homeless' person who has a flat in north London but sleeps on the streets because they're a lonely drunk, and the British public are nothing but enablers!" – Adam Holloway MP.

The excitement of Brexit Day proved too much for some Tories this week, with Adam Holloway MP offering one of the most disingenuous assessments imaginable about Britain's homelessness crisis. During a debate on the issue in the House of Commons on Thursday, Holloway told fellow MPs a story about a man he met called Andy, who, despite having an apartment in north London, chose to sleep on the streets because he was "lonely in his flat" and he couldn't "generate enough money to buy beer if not from begging on the streets".

A single anecdotal tale of a non-homeless homeless man wasn't enough, however. The Gravesham MP proceeded to tell a story of another man who he "never actually met" – "a heroin addict in Covent Garden for many years who had his leg cut off", who "absolutely maintains, and this is my experience too, that if the public were not so generous and didn't enable people to buy the heroin and buy the alcohol then he would have got off the streets an awful, awful lot earlier".

Holloway then told us his insights on homelessness stem from "personal experience" during the early 1990s, when he "spent several months living on the streets of London, Birmingham and New York…" which momentarily gave me pause for thought, before he swiftly shattered that notion by adding he was "undercover for a television programme" on ITV. It should go without saying: if your "personal experience" of homelessness is that you cosplayed a beggar in 1992 for ITV, it's more akin to saying you "understand" the perils of drug addiction because you once smoked a doink on a canal boat going down the Amstel river and it felt "moreish".

While some would argue that the issues of homelessness and rough sleeping in the UK is multifaceted and requires an extensive overhaul of government policies regarding housing, health and social services, Adam Holloway is adamant he's pinpointed the solitary cause of this crisis, and pleaded with the British public "to be honest about this… When you give cash to a beggar, not in every case, but in the vast majority of cases, you are buying heroin or you are buying alcohol or you're buying zombie Spice. So we've got to stop giving money to beggars."

Eureka! Forget the inadequacies of the state that are causing homelessness – what will really fix this problem is malevolently painting society's most destitute people as deceitful scumbags who aren't worthy of our charity. Lord, please give me the cognitive dissonance of a privately educated Tory MP who not only believes that his ruling government are powerless to rectify societal issues caused by their actions, but wants to pedal the hateful theory that we are enabling homelessness and that the fix to the problem is being a stone-hearted sociopath.

Holloway then continued to argue in the Commons that he entirely agrees with the Secretary of State for Housing, Robert Jenrick's assessment that street homelessness is a "health issue, not a housing issue". This isn't the first time the MP has failed to acknowledge that successive Tory governments might have some responsibility for the estimated 5,000 rough sleepers forming the "tip of the iceberg" of Britain's 320,000 homeless people, when he previously argued that growing homelessness was being driven by "eastern Europeans immigrants".

I wonder if it will ever get through to Tory cunts like this that everything bad happening to people in Britain isn't solely down to conscious lifestyle choices they have made, as if thousands of humans up and down the country want to sleep on freezing concrete each night. Their inability to grasp this whole situation seems to stem from their bewilderment that someone cannot just go and stay at mother's Cornish holiday home when it's unoccupied during the winter months.

It amazes me how sanctimonious pricks like Holloway can claim to care about homelessness when the party he represents is overseeing record rises in rough sleeping in the nation's capital. With Sajid Javid announcing that all ministers need to find 5 percent of cuts for each department, to help with "levelling up", whatever that means, we can be absolutely certain nothing will improve anytime soon for the people most at the government's mercy.

@MULLET_FAN_NEO