Rough Housing

The man in the street

As far as I can tell, Westminster Council, which covers most of London’s West End, banned ‘chuggers’, aggressive and intrusive ‘charity muggers’, from its streets way back in 2012.

Which is why they are not allowed to ply their trade on Oxford St, ‘Europe’s Stabbiest Busiest Shopping Street’ but are exiled just round the corner to Tottenham Court Road, which is in my borough, Camden.

Usually only the biggest and best known charities can afford to employ these annoyingly chirpy young pan handlers. Although of course they don’t often work directly for the charity they proport to represent at all.

Instead they are employed by what is essentially a sales or marketing company. And get paid on commission.

The more people they persuade to sign up to a monthly direct debit, usually around £5 to £10,  ‘About the price of a London pint amirite??!?’, the more money the chuggers, and the company they work for, makes.

Chuggers are usually very attractive, energetic young people, with plenty of passion, charisma, and hutzpah.

And it’s often hard to walk past, or ignore them, without feeling that you are somehow being rude, blinkered or uncaring.  Of course, that’s the idea. Emotional blackmail is one of the chuggers’ best weapons.

Also as a (late) middle aged Dad living in London. It’s sometimes just nice to have someone around who seems genuinely keen to talk to you.

One lunchtime, a little while ago, I watched a team of chuggers working the grisly, rubbish strewn patch of pavement, just up from Primark, on Tottenham Court Road.

These chuggers were decked out in tabards displaying the logo of a well known homelessness charity. I’m not going to say which one. But yes, quite possibly the one you are thinking of.

It’s a well respected charity, and does a lot of good work, or at least, it has in the past.

Most recently, like much of the UK’s bloated and ravenous charity sector, it seems to have morphed into something else entirely.

In this case, it has turned from an organisation which primarily focused on helping rough sleepers, into a scolding, activist pressure group, which seems more concerned with issues of social justice.

Claiming for instance that the housing ‘emergency’ (always with the emergencies) somehow affects the LGBTetc ‘community’ more than anyone else.

While tirelessly lobbying government to remove the property rights of private landlords. (Tick:Achieved)

And more likely to blame London’s homelessness problem on uncaring and pernicious ‘government cuts’ than on equally obvious factors like alcoholism, family breakdown, and most manifest of all, drug abuse.

Because it’s clear to anyone who has watched, as I did just today, a scraggly limping phalanx of five or six, scabby human husks totter urgently into a Central London side street to meet their dealer, that some form of dependency is at the root cause of much of the increase in the plague of rough sleeping.

I’m not saying government policy, especially policies linked to the useless Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, haven’t played their part.

Maybe the resources allocated to creating trans coloured pedestrian crossings, and the woeful and patronising ‘maaate’ campaign might have been better spent actually helping needy people, rather than simply advertising the increasingly unbearable Khan’s progressive credentials.

Just this week for instance Khan gleefully announced plans to waste a further £2.5m of Londoner’s cash on debunked ‘diversity training’ for Transport For London, TFL. An organisation which I would honestly not be surprised to discover, was already Britain’s second most diverse employer, after the DEI obsessed NHS.

But what do I know?

On this particular day I watched as a platoon of tabard clad chuggers intercepted and accosted office workers on their way to grab lunch.

The chuggers were certainly good at their job, full of energy, with snappy, funny chat up lines, open body language, and the sort of uniformly cheeky persona which easily switched, to a concerned and persuasive patter, once they had coaxed a harassed passer-by to stop and engage.

RADA, one of Britain’s top acting schools, is just around the corner.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the chuggers were A* students, making a few quid between lessons.

Whatever the charity is doing, it seems to be working. It raised well over £40m, from various sources, in 2022.

So far, so London. But what struck me as odd, or at least a little ironic, about the scene was that the chuggers cheerful grift was being watched, from just a few feet away, by two actual homeless people, who lay swaddled in rancid sleeping bags, right there on the grubby pavement, just below a bookshop window.

Vague and disinterested, they lay bundled together, limp, languid and vacant. Somewhere in their daily circadian cycle between being asleep, being high, and shuffling off sleepily, to get high.

A greasy cardboard sign propped up next to a snoozy, but still terrifyingly bull headed and muscular Cerberus, declared them ‘hungry and homeless, please help.’ Complete with upbeat exclamation marks and a smiley face emoji.

The office workers, were too busy ignoring the chuggers to notice them. While the charity workers, were themselves too busy encouraging the public to help the homeless, to pay them any heed.

It was quite the Hogarthian tableau.

Look, I’m not being a goody two shoes, pearl clutcher here. And I’m not claiming some kind of moral high ground. I certainly wasn’t helping.

And I’d balk at handing over £5 a month to a homeless charity, while happily(ish) forking out nearly four quid for a shot of coffee.

Plus, it’s worth remembering that even though it was in a convoluted, roundabout way, the chuggers were genuinely raising money to deal with, or at least help alleviate, this exact problem.

After all, it wasn’t as if they could simply nip into the nearby Marks and Spencers, buy a carrier bag full of sandwiches, and start handing them out to the homeless.

And then something weird happened.

Out of nowhere, two old ladies suddenly appeared with a bulging Marks and Spencers carrier bag, and began handing out sandwiches to the homeless.

These old ladies weren’t wearing tabards. They didn’t cheekily accost anyone, or ask for contributions.

Nor were the ladies on a mission to get the homeless people to give up their drugs, get a job, or find Jesus.

They just walked up, handed over a couple of sandwiches and moved on. And judging from the confident way they carried themselves, it was clear, this wasn’t their first rodeo.

But neither were they an actual official ‘charity’. I got the distinct impression that if you gave them £10 (which I didn’t) to buy sandwiches, they would spend that £10 on sandwiches. And not extract £3 along the way for ‘administration expenses’.

I’m not saying it’s all a con. But when the CEOs of the 100 largest British charities are apparently being paid an average wage of £175,000 PA, it’s clearly no longer a charity ‘sector’. It’s a charity industry.

Anyway, you can make up your own mind.

As for the old ladies. No one was paying them anything. Least of all attention.

The chuggers kept on chugging. The homeless guys ate their sandwiches. The office workers trudged back to work with their Meal Deals.

That was it.

I was reminded of the impotence of those chuggers this week, as Labour announced its exciting legislative agenda in the King’s Speech.

Which described how our new government would get to grips with the myriad of super urgent must-fix emergency issues facing our country by creating more committees, more agencies, more regulation and more laws.

Like the homeless charity, modern government was set up to solve problems and help people, but it has become bogged down in process, logistics and compliance. Forever adding layer upon layer of obfuscation to an already sclerotic, broken system. Leaving no time, energy or space to deliver on its core mission.

To keep our streets safe. To lock up criminals. To provide a functioning health service. Equip our armed forces. And perhaps most importantly of all, to create a landscape on which a vibrant market economy is free and able to grow.

On every single one of these metrics the state has failed.

The hapless Tories passion for ever increasing state intervention is being turbocharged under Labour. Despite clear evidence that such meddling is a massive drag on the economy.

When government is spending 46% of GDP, how can it be otherwise?

Though not according to our new (Never Run a) Business Secretary Johnathan Reynolds. He claims Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand of the market’ cannot deliver growth.

It seems to have worked so far Johnathan. Lifting much of the world’s poor out of poverty and destitution.

Even the Chinese Communist Party has used the invisible hand of the markets, (plus a heavy hand on the scales), to reduce the number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty from 88% in 1981, to around 0.7%  today.

So maybe it can deliver a teeny tiny amount of growth after all.

Adam Smith wrote about the transformative, positive power of free markets over 250 years ago in 1776. I wonder if students of economics will still be reading Johnathan Reynolds in 2274.

Unlikely.

Like the homeless charity, the state has become too big, too unwieldy, too slow and too distracted to achieve its stated goals, or respond nimbly and effectively to changing demands.

It has become an end to itself, an ouroboros, eating its own tail, like an ever growing Ponzi scheme.

Or as we learn this week, in the case of public sector pension liabilities, an actual Ponzi scheme.

Efficient in only a single department, expert, effective and accomplished in one area, and one area only.

Extracting money from the public.

We don’t need more chuggers, more charities, more targets, more NGOs, more regulators, more quangos and more laws.

We don’t require more agencies, more departments, more vetos, more staff, more guidance, more bosses and an ever increasing avalanche of petty, ossifying rules and diktats.

If we really want to get anything done, achieve anything meaningful, and raise our productivity, we need a smaller state, fewer know nothing technocrats, less bureaucracy.

And more old ladies, with bags full of sandwiches.

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