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Glasgow's homelessness exposed as shameful picture shows pitiful plight

This news post is about 3 years old
 

A photo showing homeless people queing for food in Glasgow during a blizzard has caused outrage on social media.

Up to 220 homeless people queued in sub-zero temperatures at George Square as heavy snow swept the city in the hope of food, blankets and support.

The charity, Kindness Homeless Street Team Glasgow, posted: “This isn’t some Eastern European country that’s been decimated by years of communist rule.

“This is Glasgow city centre last night in the 21st century where people are waiting in line to be fed by Kindness Homeless Street Team Glasgow. This makes me so angry. This has to end.

“I know some personally and most of them are good people who have just hit a ‘wee bump in the road’. We as a civilised and caring nation need to step up.

"Even if all you can give is a little mutual respect, a smile and a hey hello the next time you see a homeless person, trust me it can be enough to turn there life around. Never has been being kind matter so much now.”

Laura McSorley, who set up the community group back in 2019 to provide food, clothing, toiletries and emotional support to Glasgow’s homeless and vulnerable people, said: “That was on Monday night. We do four nights a week. We do a Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. But Monday was particularly busy and I think just the picture that captures people queueing and obviously the snow and the weather has brought quite a bit of attention to us just now.

“Monday night was particularly busy. We do take a lot of meals through to the guys as obviously we have a night in between where we don’t feed the guys so we do take more meals on a Monday and every day that we are out just to make sure the guys have got more but on Monday particularly we noticed the queue didn’t seem to go down.

"We averaged between 200 and 220 people who we gave food to on that evening.

“As funny as it sounds we give the guys a ticket because there’s a lot of queue jumping, and just to try and get a bit of social distancing as well. So we put out between 200 and 220 tickets on Monday evening which was mental”.

Laura added: “Our numbers at the beginning of the pandemic I would say were roughly between 70 and 80 people and on average, and then we have probably had between 130 to 150 present since.

“But Monday brought loads and loads of new faces, we had a few people that had just been released from prison, we had people that had fled domestic violence. There was a whole host of people in the queue on Monday.

She added: "We’ve actually had people that came to us and said they had they’ve had their furniture out their house because they’d lost their house and they are now sleeping in a caravan with limited heating, limited electricity and they are coming to us in the square for food because they don’t have a penny to rub together.

"So it’s a bit of an eye-opener.”

 

Comments

0 0
John
about 3 years ago

This picture shows we have a terrible problem but it isn't necessarily a homelessness one. It doesn't help to suggest all of the people pictured are homeless. It also conjures up a false impression that the people are sleeping rough. There has been a lot of great work carried out in Glasgow and Edinburgh during the pandemic to get people off the streets, this undermines that.

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Dana Jason
about 3 years ago

This is terrible

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Sam Shift
about 3 years ago

Weird huh!

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