This week, though it shocks me to say so, I find myself congratulating the Gibraltar Government. At last it has - albeit reluctantly - allowed itself to be dragged through the mire of equal opportunities and, tail dangling, into the twenty-first century, into an era, I still hope, of enlightenment as far as treating everyone with equal respect and acceptance. Finally, even if only after a struggle, it has stated that it will alter housing allocation policy to ensure that same sex couples have rights to joint tenancies. They have done this with a lot of middle-aged, middle-classed, middle-Christian bluster about intending to continue to support the traditional family of heterosexual couples with children and ensuring that same sex couples do not receive preferential treatment. I don't imagine for one moment same sex couples so much want preferential treatment as they want to be treated with the same rights to which they are entitled as other couples. So, the dear old Gibraltar Government - I can't help thinking of it as an ancient crone, hopefully on its last legs, reeling with decrepitude and reeking of decades of inactivity and incompetence - has managed to continue to offend while admitting it has been forced to amend its ways.
I was as startled as I was glad at reading the article in the Chronicle, simply to discover that the government had a housing policy. Only last week I called the housing department - Ministry of Housing, it's called, not unlike a well-known music venue and night club but unlike the club, well out of touch with reality - and asked for a copy of the housing strategy for the forthcoming years and copies of the allocations and homeless persons policies. I can't help it. I'm a housing officer of old and dreadfully nosy to boot. The most I managed to get were a few puzzled non-comments and a copy of a poorly-photocpied sheet to explain how to fill in the housing application form, which, on a quick read, gave me the feeling that helpful housing officers would do their utmost to find a way not to include me on the housing waiting list. I'm rather relieved, that, though in need of housing, that I am neither part of a same sex couple, nor Moroccan (working, born in Gibraltar or otherwise), because if that were the case, I get the feeling my chances of ever having a government roof over my head would be seriously scuppered.
And I guess I can afford to jest. I'm not homeless - yet. The tragedy is, that with no vision for housing, no proper financing, budgeting, planning, no respect for its tenants - the ordinary people of Gibraltar, most of whom are needy and most of whom are unlikely ever to be able to afford the only housing that is meaningfully being developed in Gib - no notion of how to administer an ageing housing stock, no real sense of how to manage its housing fairly, nor effectively, nor efficiently (those old buzz words from Thatcherite times that have yet to catch on here), the government is doing a desperate disservice to its own people.
For housing, like food, is a basic need. It is essential for the future of a community, to make sure that its stability is guaranteed by access to housing for all. That doesn't mean that housing cannot be carefully rationed in some way, or that the Government has an empty purse, but that it does as much as it can to help its electorate have decent opportunities, whatever their ethnic background, social class, physical or mental abilities, or sexual orientation. We need clear policies, long term commitment and a strategy to support families and households, whatever their composition, to contribute positively to society. And the only way they can do that is with a decent home that they can afford.
So, living rough in Gibraltar? In a town where some people proudly pronounce that no-one is poor? Maybe not in the Ethiopian famine sense. But there are street homeless huddled in corners. There are people forced to live in hostels that you would not be allowed to cage animals in. There are young families trying to bring up babies in flats wringing with damp, where the electricity can't always be used because water pours through along the cables, where the neighbours can be heard coughing and where they have to pay a large chunk of their hard-earned wages to a remote, uncaring landlord. And sadly, some of the last sentence includes government owned housing.
In a city where multi-millionnaires live a stone's throw from people who live in overcrowded, squalid conditions, that anyone should be living rough in Gibraltar, is a foul indictment of a succession terms in power of a government that has done little more than appeal to the very rich from wherever in the world, and neglect its own people.
A photograph of Turnbull's Lane, part of Gib's old town,
with some of the older properties seen in the background.
The guy in the photo was not a tramp living rough...
but he might have been.
