It's looking pretty bleak out there, dear reader.
I may not be around as much in the near future, but don't cry for me, I'm doing just fine.

Britain's Homelessness Shame.

From the story:

When the American novelist Jack London ventured among the beggars and tramps of the east end of London a hundred years ago, he set out to record the lives of men and women he described as the “refuse of a human sty”.
The characters who featured in The People of the Abyss, his masterpiece of reportage, were considered not quite human, at least not by Victorian high society.
As London wrote, they were “a different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance”.
In other words they were the ‘undeserving poor’, a section of the lower orders that was treated as beyond contempt by the Victorian middle and upper classes.
These attitudes aren’t confined to the past.
According to research published in 2017 by the London housing and support charity Evolve, more than a quarter (29%) of Londoners believe that people sleeping rough are to blame for their predicament.
Moreover, three quarters (74%) believe that rough sleepers could get themselves off the streets if they wanted to.
In other words, we still view extreme poverty through a lens tinted by the Victorian age, when Henry Mayhew, pioneer of 19th-century social research on the poor, subtitled the fourth volume of his book London Labour and the London poor, “Those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work”.

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‘Open’ London is built on exploited labour

From the story:

In other words, London should be having a conversation with itself about exploitation, in this instance exploitation dressed up as liberation.
Many of the Uber drivers I met were not budding entrepreneurs; they did the job out of desperation.
“It’s like they’ve accepted it because they’re immigrants, you know,” one Eritrean Uber driver told me of his friends.
“I mean, they don’t really have any options”.
During my onboarding session with Uber, we were showered with hip and feel-good rhetoric about the ‘diversity’ of the company by a 20-something, jeans and t-shirt-clad Uber office employee.
Progressive buzzwords rolled off his tongue while we were effectively told that workers’ rights were a relic of the past.
Money-making – or the idea of it, for you never did make much money as an Uber driver – was recast as something intrinsically bound up with liberal principles like tolerance and diversity.
This is representative of a certain type of politics, one which self-satisfyingly labels itself ‘open’, in contrast to a parallel and ‘closed’ populist nativism.
Liberal London, with its tolerance, its openness – just ignore the impoverished fleet of Uber-Eats and Deliveroo riders and the army of low paid service-sector workers – is cast as a beacon.