We are all Rogues and Vagabonds

The Tories and their Liberal Democrat allies have been accused of wanting to turn life in Britain back to Victorian times. They seem to want to get us to know our place, to respect those with wealth and to be upstanding for the Queen and the Union Jack.

Victorian life is well known to us mainly through the novels of Charles Dickens. In 1824 Dickens was working for six shillings a week in Warrens Blacking factory labelling pots of bootblack and the whole of that six shillings went to cover his board and lodging. His father had been arrested for a debt of £40 and was sentenced to serve in Marshalsea Prison. On weekends Charles would visit the family in prison.

In 1824 too London was besieged by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars to no homes and no jobs (it was ever thus). The government responded with the Vagrancy Act which in effect made it an offence to sleep on the streets or to beg.

This week three young men, Paul May, Jason Chan and William James, all residents of a squat in north London, where charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Their crime was of a profoundly Dickensian nature, we all know how obsessed many of Dickens’s characters where with food, how Pip stole food for Maqwitch or how Oliver Twist wanted more.

Their crime is they stole food from a skip at the rear of an Iceland store. According to reports they stole mushrooms, tomatoes, cheese and Mr Kipling cakes.

Under the Act Persons committing certain offences where to be deemed as rogues and vagabonds some parts of the original act have been subsumed in newer legislation but some of it remains on the statute book.

They are charged under this part of the Act “every person being found in or upon any dwelling house, warehouse, coach-house, stable, or outhouse, or in any inclosed yard, garden, or area, for any unlawful purpose.”

They face three months in prison. Where presumably they will at least be fed.

I understand that the police have returned the mushrooms, tomatoes, cheese and Mr Kipling Cakes now very well past their sell by dates to Iceland. Presumably they will put them back into the skip. They can then be collected with 890,000 tonnes of food waste collected by the London boroughs each year and added to the 1.6 million tonnes of food waste thrown out by stores across the UK.

What sort of world have we created where everyday trucks make rounds of the streets of London and take their cargo either to be incinerated or shipped up the Thames on barges to have it dumped in the sea or into landfill. In North London just 23 % is recycled. Landfill sites already cover 109 square miles of our country and an extra 16 million tonnes of rubbish is being added each year.

And we prosecute three lads for nicking some out of date mushrooms!

Of course the apologists for capitalism tell us it may not be that fair but it is efficient. The free flow of market forces ensures nay it guarantees the most efficient allocation of the factors of production. Well this demonstrates that it is neither fair nor efficient.

What is fair about the need for foodbanks? And what kind of efficiency has farmers across the globe overworking their land depleting the soil and over using chemical inputs to produce food we then put into landfill whilst people go hungry?

Sometimes it is good to be reminded of why you are a socialist and of why the trade union struggle for a fair deal at work, the co-operators struggle for pure food at fair prices and the political struggle for working class representation are all part of the same fight.

It reminds me of the words of that great Wobblie Fred Thompson. In his memoir Fellow Worker he explains why he is both engaged in his union and in the Socialist Party. He says, “perhaps my attitude towards the IWW and the Socialist Party would be clearer if I added that if there were a food co-op store nearby, I would feel I should buy there; if there were a daily labor paper here, that I should subscribe to it even if I quarrelled with the editor; if there were labor cultural institutions in which I could participate and I had the time I would do that too.”   

The editor and I may quarrel from time to time but that does not distract us from the bigger fight to maintain that daily voice for a better world.

Remember the Vagrancy Act in 1824 did not work it paved the way for the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which led to huge expansion of the workhouse system. It meant that instead of outdoor relief, on the basis it was unsustainable (have we not heard that one before too), the destitute had to enter the workhouse.

The National Trust has a workhouse at Southwell in Nottinghamshire, coincidentally built in 1824. Visitors think they are looking into the past but if we do not get this dreadful government off our country’s back it just might be their vision of the future.