The 1% are banking on our forever war in Ukraine and new one in Gaza will divert our attention from the cost of living crisis.

A small homeless community of five adults who squatted on a section of the river that bisects my city broke camp last Sunday. To where or why these nomads left their canvass homesteads, I don't know. I never spoke more than a hello to them on my way near their patch.

I still feel as if I intruded more into their lives than was necessary. I might not have taken a picture of their living arrangements. But whilst walking by them, I'd observe their habitat as if it were at a wildlife preserve which I wouldn’t have done had they been property owners. .

They had three tents pitched close to each other, and one had a First Nation’s dream catcher hanging from its front entrance. They had mats in front of their tents for their shoes and a few feet away folding chairs were placed around a table made from scrap wood that rested on milk crates.

During summer, their campground was well hidden by overgrown shrubs and bushes. I guess- they chose that spot because it was safe from thievery or police raids.

Once while walking by I saw jeans and shirts thrown on top of a tent as if to dry. It made me wonder if they were using the river to bathe or wash their clothes.

Imagining them washing either themselves or their clothing in the river reminded me of a long-ago memory I had, from one of my many visits to Russia. I once saw from the window of a train travelling through a rural far north oblast, women down by a river bank doing their wash. At the time, it felt as if I was witnessing something from Tolstoy's Russia. For the women beating clothes clean on a river like their ancestors, I am sure, it was a pain in the arse rather than a literary moment.

Homelessness and the housing crisis are now as normalised as food banks. I was a teenager when 45 years ago, food banks were introduced to the West as a temporary fix for food insecurity during the age of Margaret Thatcher, who told us “There is no such thing as society.” Sadly, Thatcher was right about society because she helped kill it. Neoliberalism was the Welfare State's assassin, and it murdered what made society, society.

So you shouldn't be surprised that today, The Rowntree Foundation claimed that in 2022 3.8 million residents of Britain lived in destitution. It is a poverty even more hopeless than in the 1930s because today's well-off and its corporate news media delegitimised socialism. That means we have no solutions to end it but heart emojis, Twitter polls and Polly Toynbee's essays in the Guardian.

The destitution millions in Britain experience now won't go away even if Labour wins the next General Election. Under Keir Starmer's leadership, Labour have shown an antipathy to workers' rights, the environment, refugees' rights and human rights during times of war.

So it is literally as "safe as houses" to say the housing crisis is here to stay because housing as an asset-based commodity is the golden goose for the 1%. Labour, like the Tories or the Democrats in the USA, can't break their addiction and loyalty to the interests of the 1%.

Democracy hasn't been this tenuous since the age of Hitler. The present is dismal, and our future is beyond precarious. Our Western world is fighting two forever wars, one in Europe and just started another one in the Middle East. These wars are militarising society at the exact moment when our economies have been irreparably damaged by the greed of the 1%,. Those wars along with an unstoppable cost of living crisis, and environmental crisis have placed everyone's civil rights into the crash position. We are bracing for impact with authoritarianism. "It's the End of the World, as we know it and I feel fine," is how REM once put it.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help. I got sick with a mild infection last month. Even being slightly ill put me financially behind. I know how bad it was recovering from cancer during covid but then I had some savings. If I get another major illness, I will sink like a stone.

So, if you can subscribe to a paid membership, thank you. I appreciate the loyalty of each subscriber. You have allowed me to build a community.

Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1100 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

So, if you can please subscribe. It is appreciated by me and it ensures the work of Harry's Last Stand has a working beachhead.

Photo by Anzhela Bets on Unsplash