Homelessness – out of sight, out of mind?

David L reports on the eviction of the residents of the tent camp in St Peter’s square in Manchester.

In the Old Testament, the first recorded punishment is homelessness and exile. Adam and Eve are thrown out of the Garden of Eden and tainted with original sin. Their son Cain receives much the same treatment, and states as much in Genesis 4:14: 

Surely You have driven me out this day from the face of the ground; I shall be hidden from Your face; I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.

Before the nation states of Europe solidified their borders or even existed, there was a dominant worldview in which the homeless vagrant was stained with the theological mark of sin and crime. Those pushed beyond borders and out of homes became subject to an entire economy of violence. This hatred carried on well past the creation of contemporary nation states, and if anything only became more intense as laws changed their focus to punishment for crimes against property. Homelessness went from punishment for some ancient crime to the crime itself. Michel Foucault notes in his book Discipline and Punish that historically the homeless were assumed to be inherently criminal and spoken of as enemy invaders or devouring locusts. As the seeds of the prison and policing were sown, and punishment became a generalised system, crime became less a violation against a particular sovereign and more a crime against the entire social order 

The least crime attacks the whole of society; and the whole of society – including the criminal – is present in the least punishment.

In short: the state and many institutions throughout civil society really hate homeless people, and have done so for a very long time.

In January 2025 the residents of the tent camp in St Peter’s square in Manchester found themselves in civil court after the Council issued their intent to pursue an order of eviction. The camp, made up of 25-30 tents and 30 people, are a group of asylum seekers who took up in the tents after having been kicked out of temporary accommodation once they secured leave to remain. They are the second group to have taken up this occupation, after another, larger group which was there in April last year. The first group was a mixture of asylum seekers and long-time homeless people; this group is purely refugees. 

In the civil court the council alleged a pattern of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and disruption caused to other citizens of the city within St Peter’s square. The residents of the camp were issued notices about the hearing only a few days before it would happen, and it seems the council expected that few, if any of the residents would be attending and that the order to evict would be unchallenged. The council received a nasty shock when all of the camp’s residents turned up an hour before the hearing time, and they were forced into a hurry to secure a bigger courtroom to accommodate the numbers. There was also a support protest outside the location of the hearing – the Manchester Civil Justice Centre, a carceral behemoth of a building which combines the decorum of civil law with the space-gobbling sleekness of real estate speculation in Manchester city centre.

It became clear that the accusations against the camp were little more than a stick up, on two fronts: firstly, because the charges levied  related to accusations against the residents of the previous camp, who had now found accommodation. The council saw no issue in treating the two groups as one and the same and using the old complaints to evict the current residents. There were almost no complaints in the council’s application for an eviction that were to do with the current residents. The single complaint that could feasibly be linked to the current occupation was the accusation that the camp was blocking work at the office space it was in front of, and was disrupting employees there. However, there was very little evidence to suggest this was the case, with apparently no complaint having come from the office space in question.

According to those who were providing solidarity in April, even the charges relating to the old group were spurious in nature. The main complaint of ‘anti-social behaviour’ referred to defecation at the camp (which was mentioned in news reports of police clearing the tent camp). However, this only happened because the council toured round  venues and businesses and made it explicit that these places were not to allow any of the homeless to use their toilets. This was just one element of a campaign by the council to get businesses and venues around the  camp to cut off access to basic provisions such as hot water. The sim card scheme at Manchester library was also stopped for a while. This scheme allowed people, in particular those who are homeless to use sim cards in their phones for the data without having to pay for it, making it crucial for things like applying for work. In essence, it seemed more like a campaign of total war against the homeless than it did like any real attempt to solve their problems. Eventually, the council  obtained permission to clear the camp, on the basis of an environmental order that bodily fluids and excrement posed an environmental risk. But this only came about because they had created the situation in the first place.

The tenants of the camp were blamed for problems which weren’t their fault. Right-wing YouTubers would come to the camp and hurl abuse and provocation and this made its way into the allegations against the camp; not that it was a mitigating factor for any behaviour, but that their presence was ‘inviting racial hatred.’ This and other accusations got to the crux of the matter – that it was not any behaviour per se that was problematic, but their presence. The camp was accused of being disruptive and blocking people from entering the office spaces next the camp, but no evidence of that was given. When the remembrance day event took place at the nearby memorial in St Peter’s square, the tenants were asked to move for the day. They did so, with no complaints, and simply waited to come back once the event was over. Once they did, they were told this had still been held against them, for causing a ‘security concern’. The homeless refugees were damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t. Much has been made, by both the council and racist YouTubers, of the size of the camp. But why is that? From speaking to someone at Greater Manchester Tenants Union (GMTU), I was told that the refugees band together in such numbers and in the particular place they do, which is near the police station, for one main reason: because they believe it keeps them safe. When members of the camp have gone off on their own, they have been targeted for mugging.

GMTU says the current order the council is trying to get from the courts is supposed to include assessments for the needs and requirements for the people living there. They say they believe that the assessments have not been done properly, and that assessments for any disabled people in the camp have not been done at all. Moreover, they don’t believe the medical needs of the homeless in the camp have been assessed. All in all, it was a shoddily made and unabashed attempt to inflict institutional violence on the camp. The moral and political framework of the past which has punished vagrancy has evolved into a cruel and vicious border regime that excludes and harms refugees even when they have leave to remain.

The court session, along with being held on short notice, was in the middle of the day, which made it hard to get people out in solidarity. Greater Manchester Law Centre were defending them in court, and these efforts came to some fruition as the matter was adjourned and moved to the high court, which will see the case in the first or second week of February. This has granted the people of the tent camp some reprieve. The hope was at the time that the next step would go well also. But there remained other concerns. Whilst speaking to GMTU, they brought up the biased and bad faith coverage of the matter by local publications such as The Mill, which gave most space to someone claiming to represent the camp who wasn’t even homeless, and did not seem concerned with the people themselves. In general, the residents of the camp seemed to be absent from coverage. My report at least had the excuse that they were in court whilst I was taking notes for the write-up, what can be said of all the other news organisations covering this? 

Unfortunately, all of these elements secured a victory for the council as the court ruled in their favour in February. The council claimed it had done their duty in supporting the homeless by referring them on to charities and support services, despite reports from a council funded hub that they are struggling with the rising number of homeless refugees. Council members made a show of saying it was a ‘national problem’ which required ‘national solutions’, whilst their council was raising duplicitous charges against the people they claimed they wanted to help. In a way the council were engaging in ‘national solutions’, solutions which are the same as anywhere else in the country: making homeless people invisible and exposing them to greater threats. Out of sight, out of mind. And it is not just the council, as is clear from the rest of this report, but the general, reactionary attitude towards the homeless that people hold, an attitude which is cultivated by British media. Just after the verdict was announced, the Manchester Evening News hosted a poll asking its readers if the homeless camp should be removed, a poll which had a simple majority saying ‘yes.’ As Foucault says, all of society is present in the punishment of those it considers criminals. We are all complicit in this. Alongside offering consistent and unconditional solidarity, we must also call out the participants in this violence, all those who maintain the hostile environment against some of the most vulnerable people in our society.