Full-time begging

Since last week my pitch has been taken over after 11.00am by a vendor of the tabloid The Sun – The Sun is owned by News International of Rupert Murdoch’s New York-based News Corporation. This distributor can plant himself, and his big patio umbrella, anywhere along the road to sell his paper but no, he is very particular about transacting his business from my spot (as a vendor of The Big Issue, I have a registered pitch in my name and can’t go anywhere I please like this lucky vendor). Declan’s pitch was also taken over by another of Murdoch’s newspapers, the free The London Paper on 30 July. The next day Declan complained to the editor-in-chief of The London Paper and sent a copy of this letter to the chief executive of News International and to Murdoch himself, having been told by the Big Issue outreach manager to phone The London Paper and/or the agency that recruits its distributors.

The issue of us not being able to stand in on our pitches to make some money selling The Big Issue – to be able to more or less survive this autumn and winter – has also been raised in Declan’s urgent application to the European Court of Human Rights of 8 September under the heading “Background of request”:

The applicant and his wife have been surviving on the streets of London by selling The Big Issue magazine, which is sold on the streets by homeless people. Frequently of late the applicant and his wife have had to walk off their pitches in order to avoid confrontation with other street traders. The applicant has lodged complaints with The Big Issue in respect of the intrusion onto his and/or his wife’s pitch of other Big Issue vendors and distributors of, inter alia, London Lite, The London Paper, City AM and Sport (see copy of the applicant’s letter and enclosures of 30 August 2007 to the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue in Supporting Documents, pp. 79-87).

As I have already written in this blog, the case of Papon v France was expedited by the Court under rule 41 of the Convention because of the advance age and ill-health of the applicant in prison: the case was lodged on 12 January 2001 and on 23 January the Court asked the respondent Government to submit information and comments about the applicant’s conditions and regime. (Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon was a Prefet de Police under General de Gaulle until 1968, and a Budget Minister to President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s. But in 1981 his war crimes caught up with him when hundreds of documents were found by accident in the recesses of a town hall. He was convicted in April 1998 for having signed orders for the deportation of 1,690 Jews between 1942 and 1944 – most went on to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and all but a handful died. The Court ruled that French courts failed to give fair treatment to Papon after his 1998 conviction, and he was awarded 29,192 euros in legal costs.)

The European Court must feel that Declan’s case is not as pressing as Papon’s had been. Or maybe it is paragraph 3 of his application to the Court, which declares: “In September 2003 the applicant and his wife moved from Dublin to Birmingham, England, where they were self-employed until July 2005. They attempted to set up an international secular humanist organisation called NAC (Network of those Abused by Church), for which the applicant’s wife developed a website at www.nac1.bravehost.com. While self-employed, they covered their expenses with savings of £44,000, the remnants of the applicant’s late father’s will.” Hasn’t a 2006 survey conducted by the University of Minnesota concluded that "Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in ‘sharing their vision of American society’”? Researchers go on: “Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry."

Back to my pitch. Declan sent yet another email on 17 September to the chairman of News International, Les Hinton, to absolutely no effect. There isn’t much more we can do, having been told by John Bird, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue, in a letter of 10 September, to more or less stop bothering him:

Dear Mr Heavey

I have employed many people over the years to do jobs related to the running of the Big Issue. I have never employed them to do my job; likewise I do not do their job.

Please bear this in mind when you are composing your letters. You do not need to address your letters to me, as it is not my job. I would only get involved if you were utterly and totally let down by those whose job it is in the Big Issue.

I hope this assist in your deliberations in pursuit of your claims.

Yours sincerely,

John Bird
The Big Issue
Founder and Editor-In-Chief

It will come to a stage when both our pitches at Liverpool Street Station will be completely taken over and I will have no option but to beg full time. (Begging is a recordable offence, and the courts may issue community sentences for those convicted a fourth time for begging. This may include community penalties for drug, alcohol and mental health treatment. Throughout the UK authorities have resorted to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), public order offences and civil injunctions as a means of dealing with begging.) Apparently there are plenty of homeless that have been selling The Big Issue for years – but that privilege doesn’t seem to apply to us.

Anyway, this morning when we were in Liverpool Street Station, getting ready to go to our pitches, a police officer came along and stood beside us as he eyed the floor below – where we beg. I think in fact the City of London police may now be considering having Declan hauled before the courts, so from now on it will be me the one doing the begging for the both of us. I may as well because it is now too cold to stand out on my pitch: between 7.30am and 8.30am this morning I sold no Big Issues at all and was the only one wearing a simple long sleeve shirt. I am, of course, looking at a prison cell pending a court hearing (as threatened on 13 September), but other than jump into the Thames I don’t see what else we can do.

In the October issue of Geographical, the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, there is a small article on a July 2006 report authored by Professor John Guillebaud, a leading authority on family planning and co-chairman of the Optimum Population Trust. The Youthquake report says that humanity is outstripping the biological capacity of the Earth by a quarter each year, and cites climate change and food shortages as consequences of a high global population and rising consumption levels. It claims that by 2050, when the world’s population is projected to reach 9.2 billion, humans will be using the biocapacity of two Earths. (The Trust suggests that governments – both in the UK and worldwide – should introduce a voluntary two-child limit, pointing to Iran, which halved its birth rate to 2.6 births per women between 1988 and 1996, as an example.) Prof Guillebaud’s concerns have been echoed by Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Science Museum and former director of the British Antarctic Survey, who has said that solving the Earth's environmental problems means addressing the size of its human population. Writing for the BBC News website, he says population is the "Cinderella" issue of the environmental movement. "Unless and until this changes," he writes, "summits such as [the December 2005 Montreal Summit on the control of carbon emissions "Beyond Kyoto"] in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty."

You would reckon that for once the pro-family organisations, which continue to place obstacles in the way of women who want to control their fertility, would shout up since you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that the issue of population management must be addressed to deal with the Earth's environmental problems. But no, they are as anti-vocal as ever. The Geographical states that the Youthquake report has come under fire from the World Congress of Families and a few minutes spent in Google lets you see that the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and Comment on Reproductive Ethics are also doing their best to brush it off. If NAC was up and running it would have a meaningful interview with the author, postcasts, and would try to find scientists that concur with his view; and, of course, I am of the opinion that a photograph speaks a 1000 words, so I would have plenty of them to make the point of the importance of voluntary family planning … NAC would give these Christian organisations a good run around – to be honest, giving these Christian organisations and the Vatican a good run around has been my first and last thought every single day for the last eleven months.