As Andy Burnham was preparing to be formally announced as Labour leader last Friday, I was in south London, watching how a charity outreach team tries to support rough sleepers.
By Monday, as our new prime minister was outside No 10 and pledging “I will soon go through that door behind me and issue my first instruction – to end rough sleeping in our country”, I was in Reykjavík, chatting to his Icelandic counterpart, Kristrún Frostadóttir, about her country’s upcoming EU referendum.
I say this not simply to advertise the somewhat varied life I lead, in the hope you want to keep reading a weekly diary; but because these two very different experiences inspired in me the hope that Burnham might do something very radical not just on rough sleeping, but also on Europe.
Rough sleeping was a priority for him as mayor of Greater Manchester, and though he did not meet his initial pledge to end it by 2020, through his Bed Every Night initiative he did get the numbers down to just 89 by the following year.
Since then, however, not least thanks to frozen housing allowances, asylum seeker and other evictions, and wider national trends, the numbers have risen again. Burnham will now be in a greater position to do something about those wider national trends than at any time in his long career as an elected politician.
I know he occasionally lumps in New Labour with the “neoliberal consensus” of the last 40 years, but I would point to the Blair government’s success in massively reducing rough sleeping as an example both of something a Tory government would never have done, and something a Labour government did and any Labour government should seek to do.
The only time the Tories really even tried to deal with rough sleeping was during the Covid pandemic, and that was as much about the fear that nice middle-class people would catch it from homeless people as it was about a fundamental belief that the number of people living without a roof over their head is a national obscenity.
Thanks in large part to the work of the Social Exclusion Unit and the Rough Sleepers Unit, under my old boss TB we cut rough sleeping in England by three-quarters, well ahead of the schedule we had set ourselves. By 2010, it was at its lowest level since records began. Then came austerity.
Burnham will not be able to fix rough sleeping overnight. But he will only begin to fix it if he gives it the same level of priority as he did when in Manchester. It looks like he will, which has to be good news for the sad souls I saw with the St Mungo’s team last week.
You might have imagined I would want nothing more to do with an EU referendum, given the damage done in 2016. But I couldn’t resist heading to Iceland to check out their referendum, due on August 29.
The vote is not on whether – yet – to join the European Union, but whether to resume the negotiations that began in 2009, but were suspended in 2013 when the country elected a Eurosceptic government. To varying degrees, the three parties that make up Kristrún Frostadóttir’s coalition are backing YES.
However, nearly all the big business voices are backing NO, fearing a loss of their markets, not least in fisheries, to Europe. The media is mainly for NO too, as are the major trade unions.
Though YES is leading in the polls at the moment, it is tight. In the latest poll, of those who gave a definitive answer, it stands at 53.1% for YES and 46.9% for NO.
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As a whole, however, it stands at 44.5% for YES, 39.4% for NO, with 14.6% undecided and 1.5% refusing to say. Not dissimilar to the pre-Brexit polling, then, but with a lot of undecideds. It will be very close.
The economic, security and geostrategic arguments all strike me as being in favour of YES. But I thought that about Remain, too. The nature of the vote, however, means that some people who are against joining are nonetheless in favour of pursuing talks.
So I wonder if the beginning of the radicalism I am hoping for from Burnham might be making and winning the argument that in such dangerous and turbulent times we need to be able to keep all options open. Like the Icelandic people are trying to do.
Kristrún Frostadóttir is very popular with the Turks, it would seem. Before heading to Ankara for the recent Nato summit, she had 19,000 followers on Instagram.
Highly photogenic, and a stylish dresser, the coverage of her at Nato saw her Instagram following soar to 275,000, an increase of 1,347%. Given that Iceland’s population is just narrowly above 400,000, I suspect that makes her the most followed leader in the world, per head of own population.
The St Mungo’s outreach team was led by Marco Costa who, as his name suggests, is Italian. He came to the UK to do a master’s on Middle East politics in 2018, stayed on, and is now en route to becoming a naturalised Brit.
It was inspiring to see the care and compassion with which he handled the very varied kinds of people we found sleeping on pavements, in doorways, underpasses, parks and cemeteries. Some he already knew well.
Of the rest, some did not want help. One or two made that clear in very aggressive terms. Others welcomed the offer of advice and support. David from Yorkshire just wanted to chat.
After a couple of hours, I got quite good at spotting the huddled bodies. A flash of white material through a few bushes led us to a young man sleeping inside a duvet cover without a duvet. We were mid-heatwave, but in the early hours after a night trying to sleep on the ground, he was cold.
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A22-year-old Afghan asylum seeker had lost papers, phone, possessions. Beyond the duvet cover, he had nothing more than the T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and Croc shoes he was wearing. He spoke little English.
Marco tracked down a Pashto interpreter who helped us speak to him, while Marco rang round on another phone to see if there might be a spare spot in one of the charity’s shelters. After half an hour, he found one.
It would be left to others to assess his situation and see whether anything more could be done to help him. It was all quite stressful, and very emotional.
“What do you think?” I asked Isabelle Stanley, who was with me to write a piece for The Rest Is Politics newsletter. “What I think,” she said, as the young man was being taken to the shelter, and we pressed on to check on the next person we found sleeping out, “is that Marco is a really good man.”
Indeed he is, and St Mungo’s is a really good charity.
My partner, Fiona, has little interest in football, yet wanted to sit with me and watch England v Argentina. I am a little bit like ex-French president Jacques Chirac, who once told me he liked to watch football on TV alone, and if his wife, Bernadette, insisted on being there, he preferred her not to speak. Concentration required, you see.
After the England goal, and the defensive substitutions, Fiona did however say: “Why is he taking off attackers and putting on defenders? Shouldn’t they try to get another goal?”
Following the avalanche of subsequent punditry saying much the same thing, she now believes she should be England manager.
