Homeless People are People Too

Andrew Barnett
5 min readAug 28, 2022
Photo by Jonathan Kho Ming Jun on Unsplash

The UK is facing higher and higher energy bills as the British government fails to offer any meaningful assistance to those in need. Campaigns like Don’t Pay UK have sprung up with people unable to pay their energy bills now saying they refuse to pay. All of this comes at a time when fossil fuel companies are making record profits at the expense of ordinary people. The blatant greed of fossil fuel companies is emblematic of wider patterns of neoliberalism, which is essentially characterized by less regulation and less tax with a view that individuals are responsible for their own fate. For instance, if millions of people in the UK become destitute due to rising energy costs, then that is their personal fault and the government or society as a whole bears no responsibility for helping them. Such neoliberal dogma, of course, ignores systemic injustices and systems of marginalization including structural racism, heteropatriarchy or how whiteness continues to convey power and privilege to those who possess it.

One aspect of this neoliberal blaming of individuals is related to homelessness. Of course, homelessness is disproportionately experienced by people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people (particularly trans people) and other marginalized groups. Being constantly surrounded by neoliberal ideas means that we become desensitized to how horrible it is that British society has homelessness and to the structural factors leading to homelessness. There are easily enough homes to house everyone in the UK and surely access to housing should be a basic human right available to all. Instead, British society is focused on blaming people who are homeless for their homelessness and criticizing poor people as lazy and unmotivated. This focus on laziness is also related to how neoliberalism constructs value in productivity. If people are not being productive and are not producing value for rich capitalists, then they are useless and lazy. This denigration and systematic marginalization of poor and homeless people is an important aspect of why British society is largely unconcerned with ending homelessness (at least among the upper classes).

I now want to turn to the reason for writing this blogpost, which is an interaction I had with a man who was about to become homeless a few nights ago. I had seen Jack (not his real name) quite a few times before, but I had always passed by him hurriedly without looking at him. A few nights ago, he approached me and asked me if I wanted to buy the magazine The Big Issue, which is a magazine founded to give homeless people or people about to become homeless a chance to earn income. He explained to me that he bought the magazines for 1.50 pounds and sold them for 3 pounds, thus being able to earn a bit of income. He told me that he had not been able to sell many of the magazines and needed to earn 35 pounds that night to be able to pay his rent for the week and avoid becoming homeless. I purchased one of the magazines, but he told me that there would be no chance that he could earn enough money that night for his rent and would have to sleep on the step where he was sitting. We then chatted a bit about how bad the Tories are and the energy bill spike. As he mentioned again that he needed 35 pounds to avoid becoming homeless, I realized that I could use my privilege to go to the cash machine and withdraw 35 pounds so that he could pay his rent that night. I then paid him the 35 pounds, shook his hand, and chatted a bit before walking to the bus.

I wanted to recount this story not in any way to brag. I have many times walked past homeless people and not given them any money. I wanted instead to recount this story because it is an illustration of how care for fellow humans hasn’t been destroyed under neoliberalism. I easily could have still walked away when he approached me at first, but once he started talking to me, I was happy to continue. I feel that homeless people are often considered as sub-humans to be thrown a few coins every once and a while when they beg. This story was a good illustration of how homeless people (or people about to become homeless) are people too and deserve love and care and support. I fully understand that the 35 pounds will not have fixed any of the structural problems around homelessness and that Jack will still be facing problems when he must pay rent next week. But giving Jack the 35 pounds felt like an ardent commitment to helping other people instead of the neoliberal response which would have been something along the lines of: “Well sucks for you; you should have sold more magazines”. In some sense, it felt like an act of resistance against a neoliberal system that was begging me to turn away and not help and not care.

Giving Jack the 35 pounds also made me reflect more deeply on the privilege I have in my own life. I have never experienced homelessness and have always had food to eat and nice housing to stay in. I’ve been an international student for 5 years in the UK and my parents have paid my tuition and living costs. My status as a white man from an upper middle-class family in the US also conveys enormous privilege. I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to be approaching midnight and facing sleeping on the streets because I cannot pay rent. Even though I cannot imagine this, though, I refuse to accept that this is acceptable. I refuse to accept that people have to be poor or homeless. As increasing numbers of people face dire poverty and homelessness from recession in the UK, I wonder if more people will also come to this conclusion. I sincerely hope that it will lead towards a reckoning with neoliberalism and towards the creation of a society that very much treats fellow humans as human beings instead of as objects creating value for capital. This reckoning must also entail a dismantling of interlocking forms of oppression such as heteropatriarchy and structural racism and ableism. Fighting back against these forms of oppression also entails standing in solidarity with homeless people and people about to become homeless and treating them with the care they deserve.

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Andrew Barnett

Feminism, queer struggles, decolonization. Occasionally random things like Star Wars