Homeless Musical Chairs Where The Music Never Stops?

radio-controlled boat filled with figures of people
An exhibit highlighting the plight of refugees. It is attributed to the UK's anonymous street artist, Banksy. The exhibit was part of a larger work called Dismaland. Read more here.

“So . . . let’s run these homeless leeches out of town. Surely it can’t cost more than following them from park to park, sidewalk to sidewalk, in order to bulldoze their meagre belongings yet again into the dust?”

This decidedly imperfect logic trails people without homes wherever they attempt to go. Including back to your town, when some other local or regional government pays them a stipend to return once again to your precious land, reacquainting them once more with your trusty bulldozers.

If you are inclined to think there’s a certain unhinged madness to this picture, let’s take the lunacy all the way to a national level. A sane national government could attack a lack-of-housing problem internally, as a national project focused on providing adequate quantities of housing everywhere within the nation. That could help to stop a local/regional government’s flawed idea of ‘everywhere else, just not here.’ Many national governments used this obvious, and ultimately successful, method to rebuild damaged and obliterated housing following World War II.

But what about an insane national government?

In this case, a national solution appears to also hinge on the kicker: ‘put them on a bus to . . . just not here.’ Seems beyond the pale, doesn’t it, that a national government would attempt to export its national crisis with the inevitable kicker to some other nation. Fortunately we can gain some insight on the effectiveness of such a plan, because the world is watching one or two nations attempting to do just that.

What can be learned by the ‘away bus’ carryings-on in the United Kingdom? As it happens, the plan in question can only work by some type of exceedingly expensive air bus. Not one of them has yet become airborne to carry people to another country.

Humans are the guaranteed shifty characters that we all know and love, particularly in government groupings such as to be found in the UK parliament. Also in the equivalent institutions in Rwanda. Yes, that ‘just not here’ kicker might one day finally be implemented at a nation to nation level, dumping UK’s unwanted into a small African country.

Human nature being what it is, we can reasonably expect that one fine day in the future, the return of the same old bewildered faces — or an equivalent new batch, as they drag their meagre possessions across tarmac at an airport or unload them from a salt-stained rubber boat.

And meanwhile . . . is there a meanwhile?

Well, yes. Meanwhile, read more at openDemocracy: England could have built 22% more social homes last year with Rwanda budget