Anyone would imagine the problem of rough sleeping is unique to the UK.
I am not quite sure why this thread has become one about rough sleeping but should you try to imagine there is any good in the UK and the majority of us have reasons to be optimistic about the future, jumping in with
people use food banks
people sleep on the streets
only Labour care for the NHS
has become a theme.
It's a sort of virtue signalling now on the politics threads by the left. Whilst rough sleeping and poverty/food banks are real causes of concern, and we should all fight to ensure the NHS remains free to all, always, anyone from another planet looking in would imagine every street in every town in the UK is strewn with people living in a cardboard box or a doorway, that we are all so impoverished we cannot even afford a loaf of bread and that most of us had been denied NHS care because there were padlocks on the doors of GPs surgeries.
They create a worst case scenario every time, as if this were the norm.
Oh and before the usual suspects froth that these are concerns, let me say I know they are. We all do.
However yet another ploy in any government bashing discussion by some posters is to paint as uncaring anyone who doesn't mention the phrase "food bank" at least five times on any thread.
Most of us have decent lives, most of us are grateful for that and most of us really care about others who are not so fortunate. Labour did not eradicate the problems of the poorest when in office from 1997 - 2010.
They did have a policy of open door immigration though (dare I mention it?) and as mentioned, many who sought a life in the UK did end up on the streets. David Blunket famously said there is "no obvious limit" to the number of immigrants who could settle in Britain but added that there needs to be a "balance" between "different forms of entry, migration and residency".
He accepted however that in some parts of the country, local people felt swamped or overwhelmed by new arrivals. But he declined to say how many people he thought Britain could comfortably hold, insisting that it had always been "a crowded, vigorous island".
Asked if there was a maximum population Britain could house, he replied: "I don't think there is." (From the Guardian, not the Heil.)
We live with those problems today. Many who entered the UK, either legally or illegally could not support themselves and depended on the state to put a roof over their heads. This is conveniently forgotten by the left because to mention it as a fact has them 'frothing' (their word) about concerned people being 'racist' or 'xenophobic' when that concern is nothing of the kind.
I've spotted a pattern on these threads. I cannot be the only one.