He was reading a book, a thick book, probably one of those
long, complicated novels about family sagas or multiple intrigues. Totally
engrossed, he was about a third of the way through the book, his grey hair
falling over his eyes and with one hand occasionally stroking his stubbly
beard. He looked comfortable, cosy even, in his sleeping bag…
…which was on a cardboard ‘mattress’ on the edge of one of
the narrow streets in Barcelona’s old Gothic Quarter, one of those streets that
has no pavement. I spotted him and the delivery lorry swerving round him at the
same moment, the driver swearing at the invisibility of a dark-blue sleeping
bag on the side of the road. The reading man did not even look up from his book
as the lorry swerved, such was his concentration.
The man in the Barcelona sleeping bag is homeless. One of the thousands of
people in Barcelona who spend each night in doorways, on cardboard mattresses.
A few of these folk find their way into squats. We’ve just
had three fires in and around Barcelona in buildings occupied by squatters. All
of them linked to multiple causes, but principally to the fact that the squats
either had no electricity (and the fires were caused by candles) or that they
had an illegal and as it turns out dangerous connection to the electrical
mains, in one case with equipment from the 1960s that blew up with the
electrical load. I witnessed one of these fires on the way in to work on
Monday, with three firefighters leading an injured man to an ambulance.
Poverty is Murderous
Poverty is murderous. It’s murderous in part simply by being
poverty (as anyone who has read Pickett and Wilkinson's ‘The Spirit Level’ will know), but it’s also
murderous because of what it forces people, desperate people, to do. To squat
an old council building and to risk their lives hooking up wires to the nearest
street light; or to leave a candle burning next to the mattress where mum and
two kids are sleeping. It is the source of stress, of accepting poor working
conditions and the ill-health that results from them, and it results in the
distinct pattern of life expectancy that we can see in Catalonia or Scotlandwhen we compare poor districts with rich.
The solutions are complicated but not impossible. They
include personal actions (what you give, where you shop, who you complain to)
and public actions, to improve benefit systems, and to tax the wealthy.
This last point should be the aim of any government, but
especially of a Labour government. So you would hope that there was some
reasonable chance that, with poverty such a widespread disorder in Britain, the
next Government would be Labour.
Corbyn, Confused
Today, there is almost no hope that that might happen. The
extraordinarily confused leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the indecision that
seems to have rent the party into at least four quarters (combining pro- or
anti-Brexit, and socialist or centrist), mean that Labour keeps falling in the
polls. And yesterday’s YouGov poll seems to confirm that Labour voters will
abandon the party if it colludes in a no-deal Brexit.
Like a lemming in the springtime, Jeremy seems to be
heading straight for the cliff edge. His pre-Christmas Guardian interview was a
classic, inventing a future full of fluffy unicorns and hairy fairies in which
he would win an election, head over to Brussels, demand a whole new deal and
come back triumphant by March 29th. Utterly unbelievable, and
fabulously fantastical.
He must know that.
Which means just one thing: that Jezzer
is, indeed, aiming for a no-deal Brexit so that he can then blame the Tories
and force their resignation via votes of confidence.
He is massively misreading the situation. If Theresa May
gets her Brexit she will, as she has promised, organise a huge Brexit
celebration on the night of the 29th March. She knows, and Jezzer
does not, that this will inflate a Rule Britannia bubble over England, a
re-ignition of right-wing patriotism, anti-foreigner patriotism, that will keep
the Tories in power for a generation. (Until the "patriots’" sons and daughters
realise that they have been swindled by their parents).
The fires and deaths amongst the poor in Barcelona are a
powerful reminder that we need left-of-centre governments in power, that it is
the job of left-of-centre politicians to get back into power. That means
honesty, and pragmatism, with voters.
It
is Jeremy’s fault that Labour is dreaming of utopias when it should be on the
doorsteps winning voters, and on the Commons floor winning votes.
