World Cups and Tampons

Towards the end of August, as Libyan citizens fought bloody battles over the future of their country, teams of homeless and marginalised people from 64 countries played in a ‘Homeless World Cup’ final in Paris.  Libya did not have a team there.  Somalia, with over 1,463,780 people who are what the UN describes as ‘internally displaced persons’, did not have a team there.  Scotland did send a team and won, beating Mexico 4-3.  The Cabinet Secretary for Health & Wellbeing & Cities Strategy, Nicola Sturgeon, took time out from not doing anything on equalities to tweet her congratulations.

Nicola Sturgeon - took time out from
not doing anything on equalities to
tweet her congratulations

 Mel Young, President and co-founder of the Homeless World Cup said :

"The Homeless World Cup exists to end homelessness. The impact of this competition is profound.

"It has engaged over 100,000 homeless people since it started [2003] with participants changing their lives for the better."

This reminds me of the similarly grandiose claims made for Band Aid by Bob Geldof in the 1980’s.  And yet there are thousands of people dying of starvation in Somalia this year, some 30 years on from Bob’s expletive laden demands to give him money for Africa.  Early in August, it was estimated that 29,000 children under 5 had died as a result of the famine in the preceding 90 days.  This is an awful, sickening and deeply shameful testimony to the sustained and deliberate failure of the affluent west to break the invisible chains of a structural economic dependency – a contemporary form of slavery - the west has created in its relationships with Africa.

In many ways, using football as a focus for filling one of the many gaping holes in the supposed safety nets of society seems as irrelevant now as using pop music was then to eliminating the cycle of famine and death in Africa.  Quite how the obscene earnings of footballers, the corruption of football’s governing bodies, and the deep-rooted racism in football in such as Spain, can combine to offer a model for much these days is not at all clear.  Even Forbes magazine [speciality in publishing lists of obscenely rich people] has recognised that football players are being paid such shed-loads of money they need their own ‘rich lists’ [which in May of this year David Beckham headed with income over the last 12 months of $40million].

That aside, the basic numbers on homelessness offers a more sobering context for Mel’s wishful thinking that the HWC “exists to end homelessness”.  Data available from the Poverty Site shows that, in the last 11 years, the numbers of households in Scotland [not people, households] found to be ‘newly homeless’ in any year was 32,000 in 1999/2000 and at 2009/10 had reached around 38,000.  It reached 40,000 in 2003/04. 

Mel may be right about the HWC participants ‘changing their lives for the better’.  Ending homelessness?  No, and it is cruel to pretend that it could.  Homelessness is a structural problem which is a direct legacy of how we have shaped and refined our society over these last few centuries.  We could, if there was a collective political and societal will, permanently solve homelessness in the next 10-20 years.  Society and government does not have that collective will.  Homelessness is, and has been for a very long time, part of the unwritten and unspoken ‘price’ [along with low pay, unemployment, poor education and the mortality of such as Shettleston man] we have paid for an unequal distribution of wealth where, as a recent Office for National Statistics report explains :

In 2006/08, the least wealthy half of households in Great Britain had 9 per cent of total wealth (including private pension wealth), while the wealthiest half of households had 91 per cent of the total. The wealthiest 20 per cent of households had 62 per cent of total wealth including private pension wealth.

In return for the middle class reaching their Nirvana of bungalow-land, we choose not to provide decent housing for all who need it in Scotland.  We choose not to design a real safety net to stop people in Scotland becoming homeless.  We choose these outcomes.  We have made our Faustian pact.  Homelessness on this scale does not happen as a result of some random outcome in some universal pin ball machine.  It is an inevitable by-product of the deliberate creation of permanent poverty in our society and of our regularly choosing not to change it. 

Kicking a football around the parks of Paris will not change it either.  So just why was Nicola tweeting her congratulations?

Couple more quotes from the UN on life for the 1,463,780 non-Homeless World Cup playing ‘internally displaced persons’ from Somalia.

Women have to walk long distances to collect water, exposing them to the risk of rape and other forms of violence.

Only a limited number of IDP women and girls receive sanitary materials, often in insufficient quantity and on an irregular basis. The lack of domestic and hygiene supplies prevents many women and girls in IDP settlements and host communities from participating in community functions.

Tampons.  We can’t even organise an adequate supply of tampons for Somali women and girls.