A small family group of American visitors was enjoying a tour of Aberdeen city centre with someone who looked like a private guide.
I couldn’t quite catch what he was saying, but I followed the guide’s hands as they pointed this way and that around the shopping square at St Nicholas Street.
I imagined he was picking out something of historical significance in this ancient spot, but I doubted if it was the modern Marks and Spencer store which towered over us.
They didn’t hang around, and moved off quickly along Union Street.
Not surprising: I would have done the same – a kerfuffle had broken out a few yards up the road behind them. A group of beggars shouted various profanities as police attempted to evict them.
They had created their own version of a HMO (House of Multiple Occupation), but in a shop doorway – a vacant, abandoned shop, as you might expect in this once-proud gem of a street, now somewhat tarnished and decaying by the day.
Homeless people are also being squeezed by the cost of living crisis, except they don’t have anything to heat, let alone eat; drowning in their own “barely living” crisis long before today’s paralysis.
Where were the police moving them onto? It’s a never ending dichotomy around those living on the street: the challenge of cracking down while simultaneously caring for life’s victims.
Who deserves a financial lifeline from the government?
I paused to take in the scene; it was hardly a comfortable picture for visitors.
Now a kind of “wagon train” was rolling in: charity workers in brightly-coloured vests pulling trolleys. Laden with hot drinks and snacks for down-and-outs, volunteers began dishing them out to eager, wretched hands. A mini version of refugee crises we see in far-off places.
Evicted beggars shouted, the starving were fed, a man stood idly by holding a bottle of brown sauce, while another played a cheery polka on his accordion – hoping for tips from passers-by.
Hang on; rewind that and pause – “a man… holding a bottle of brown sauce”?
Yes, that was me. I’d just bought it, but now wished I had put it away in a bag.
It wasn’t any old sauce, but Marks and Spencer brown sauce (flavoured with molasses and apples, I’ll have you know). I suddenly felt embarrassed, gawping from a few feet away – as the destitute clambered for scraps – while clutching a symbol of consumer decadence.
A snapshot like this might have adorned a socially-aware 1970s rock album cover as biting satire: the haves and have-nots, you might say.
Some are immune, of course: the very wealthy, and politicians with fat salaries and gold-plated pensions bankrolled by us taxpayers
A concept not as clear cut as it used to be, in the current fuel poverty crisis. Blurred by frenzied debate over who deserves a financial lifeline from the government, as apocalyptic energy bills threaten to bankrupt or kill us.
Cost of living crunch will affect almost all of us
Some are immune, of course: the very wealthy, and politicians with fat salaries and gold-plated pensions bankrolled by us taxpayers.
They lecture us about how to tighten our belts. They talk of cash support being pumped “at those most in need” – they mean people on benefits.
Very commendable, but the fact is that virtually all of us will be hammered in one way or another. Whether you are a deprived family in a grimy council flat, or comfortable in a detached bungalow in a leafy suburb.
We have waited ages for Boris Johnson & the Govt of which Liz Truss is a part to advise us what we should do about the extraordinary living crisis that we are facing and FINALLY who knew the answer was a NEW KETTLE?
— nazir afzal (@nazirafzal) September 1, 2022
I’ve thought this for a while, but a UK Government minister finally had the guts to say it the other day by warning that households below £45,000 a year would be sucked into financial disaster.
The Tories forever bang on about “hardworking families” being their very lifeblood, but these middle-income earners will also be devastated, even though they are not on benefits.
Jobs and homes will be lost; families ripped apart forever. Simply targeting people at the bottom of the heap won’t be enough.
Pensioners can’t go on strike
Our new PM must act decisively, with immediate effect; the title doesn’t mean “prevaricating minister” – that’s the kiss of death.
Have you noticed how pensioners are demonised whenever there is talk of giving them a pay rise? There is an unfair perception that all pensioners are well off.
While there are millionaire silver-hairs around, the majority either rely solely on the miserly state pension (up to £9,600 per year, way below average pay for part-time workers), or maintain a modest lifestyle from state and small private pensions – after decades of hard work and paying taxes to earn them.
It’s a delicate balance to maintain, but the elderly can’t go on strike when ends don’t meet. They need help, too, after projections that energy bills will wipe out state pensions.
They say it’s easier than you think to slide into the gutter after losing a job, home and family.
Most of us are not in the gutter, but wobbling along an adjacent path we feel is breaking up beneath our feet.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of The Press and Journal
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