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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
Which smells worse, a homeless person unable to wash or the rancid hypocrisy and evil of those who made them homeless and keep them homeless?
The new Criminal Justice Bill has been causing some concern among those who help homeless people and campaign for their welfare.
Among the provisions of the planned new law is one cracking down on homeless people for being excessively smelly.
As might be expected, this has drawn the ire of those rather quaint people who believe in old fashioned concepts such as compassion, understanding and basic human decency. Some of these naive fools even suggest that anybody deprived of decent washing facilities, and with more pressing matters on their hands such as not freezing to death and worrying about being kicked half to death - or completely to death - late one night by a gang of feral drunks for a laugh, could be forgiven for not being as easy on the noses of passers-by as a spring bouquet.
However, perhaps rather than the proposed new rule being condemned, it should be expanded for the sake of fairness and equality of opportunity. Perhaps the smelliness provision of the Criminal Justice Bill should be broadened to cover other smells. For example, there are certain stinking people we find:
Presiding over a system which methodically strips away vital provision for people with devastating mental health conditions, thereby knowingly ensuring that those people’s lives are so chaotic that they are barely able to function as human beings, let alone put a roof over their head.
Cheerfully allowing the country to be stripped of what was once among the finest social housing provision in the world, leaving millions of innocent people unable to even dream of raising a deposit on a cheaply-built starter home - not even if they save every spare penny for a decade or more.
Leaving millions more people at the mercy of filthy hellbound slum landlords, in whose stinking hives of squalor they dare not complain about a boiler belching poisonous gas or a crop of deadly mould thriving on a damp-streaming bedroom wall, for fear of they and their children being cast out onto the streets.
Giving power company bosses the nod to raise prices obscenely, hurting tens of millions of ordinary people and forcing an untold number to choose between heating their homes in the dead of winter and being able to afford food.
Trying to pin the blame for the nation’s ills on the homeless, the desperate, the elderly, poor wretches drowning in the channel or whoever else lacks the power, the wealth or the media clout to fight back.
Tolerating, in one of the wealthiest nations on the face of the earth, the necessity not only for food banks but the fact that the desperate users of those food banks include people who work in vital public services such as the NHS.
The people responsible for these matters are also a bit smelly. In fact, they are very smelly indeed. In fact, now I think about it, the obscene, festering, hectic stench of their hypocrisy and sheer evil is enough to rock the very foundations of Heaven.
Still, you can’t fault them for their dedication. After all, unlike homeless people, they have a choice as to whether to be a bit whiffy.