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Beggars in Strand Street


Manx Bean

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Years ago, like 98 or something i dunno I was mostly high but i ran out of money in holland, slept in the vondlepark like lots of others and spent a couple of days collecting and cashing in peoples empties until i could afford a ferry ticket back to harwich. I wasn't begging obvs, but was definitely a vagrant. I don't see how that is possibly a jailable offence, and its probably even worse since brexit - at least back them i could have been easily employed.

The world fucking sucks.

Kill the rich 

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3 hours ago, Gladys said:

Or under coercion.  I do hope that angle is being looked at. 

Presumably that was why they were interviewed separately with translators.  But they're married couples and there was no one with them, so it looks like they were working independently. 

I wonder how long it is since any one was done under the 1896 Vagrancy Act (as opposed to the 1886 Act which involved getting into a fight with a bouncer on coke).  But of course the were really being prosecuted under the "Taking the Piss Act" because they had already been sent off the Island this month.  I wonder if the imprisonment was to give time for their deportation to be organised when they got back to the UK.

2 hours ago, offshoremanxman said:

What was that ridiculous charge? Displaying a wound or deformity with the purpose of soliciting money? 

It's worth reading the 1896 Act:

https://legislation.gov.im/cms/images/LEGISLATION/PRINCIPAL/1896/1896-0002/VagrancyAct1896_1.pdf

like most Victorian law it's quite short and ridiculously vague.  And full of the most bonkers language.

I think there's also a mistake in the footnotes or they've accidentally legalised street prostitution.

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35 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

Years ago, like 98 or something i dunno I was mostly high but i ran out of money in holland, slept in the vondlepark like lots of others and spent a couple of days collecting and cashing in peoples empties until i could afford a ferry ticket back to harwich. I wasn't begging obvs, but was definitely a vagrant. I don't see how that is possibly a jailable offence, and its probably even worse since brexit - at least back them i could have been easily employed.

The world fucking sucks.

Kill the rich 

Best thing to do to discourage others from trying the same thing. The obvious difference is that you didn't go to Holland with the intention of begging.

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2 hours ago, Kopek said:

radio 4 prog on modern slavery just finishing. Not necessarily the same situation but timely?

Not a good reflection on society!

Get it on catch up. 

Absolutely. Essence of the same problem here for a taster:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66260064

Outrageous dereliction of duty in that sector despite repeated promises to sort it out. Many of the problems can be traced back to another private equity scam, debt loading, asset stripping followed by financial collapse.

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29 minutes ago, woolley said:

Best thing to do to discourage others from trying the same thing. 

Also, why? I liked bumming around in europe, it was a cool time. I wouldnt want to discourage anyone from doing it. Although it is obviously much harder now. Back then you could work a bar for a couple of  weeks or so in Cadiz or Nice easy enough, now there are massive fucking walls to deal with. Its shit. 

 

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7 minutes ago, woolley said:

I don't think it's meant to be nice.

No, of course not.

There is no way, none at all, that someone would choose to come to the isle of man from Romania to beg. You understand that right? 

These people will have been treated like shit by 'their own kind' to have ended up in this situation and now they are here they have immediately been condemned. It is in all ways fucking awful. 

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First boat home in the mornin' for them all. We've had problems with these beggars in Belfast. Some of them actually brought their children to sit and beg in the streets. The problem was always worse at Christmas time when they went begging next to ATM's outside city centre banks.

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1 minute ago, joebean said:

They are destitute here, where they don’t speak the language and must find it difficult to get help. The kindest thing would be to put them on a plane to a place where they speak Romanian. Like Romania, for instance. 

at which point their ability to understand and speak english increases 10 fold.

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8 hours ago, TheTeapot said:

No, of course not.

There is no way, none at all, that someone would choose to come to the isle of man from Romania to beg. You understand that right? 

These people will have been treated like shit by 'their own kind' to have ended up in this situation and now they are here they have immediately been condemned. It is in all ways fucking awful. 

To be honest this is really shitty and makes us look like some bonkers banana republic 

https://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/four-jailed-after-begging-in-strand-street-628657

“The Isle of Man doesn’t have a homeless shelter and that is one of the reasons why they face criminal prosecutions today.”

So instead of just giving them a boat ticket to go home we gave them 21 days in prison as they had nowhere to live and then a boat ticket followed by an exclusion order not to come back. Presumably to allow enough time for them to be met at Heysham by UK immigration and deported. And because he had an gammy arm and a dodgy eye we did him under some crackpot 1896 begging law. 

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8 hours ago, TheTeapot said:

No, of course not.

There is no way, none at all, that someone would choose to come to the isle of man from Romania to beg. You understand that right? 

These people will have been treated like shit by 'their own kind' to have ended up in this situation and now they are here they have immediately been condemned. It is in all ways fucking awful. 

How do you know that? That is pure assumption to feed your opinion. Romania is a European country that is a member of the EU. Why would you assume that Romania can’t help its own people? I might assume that they want to leave Romania for other reasons than being treated like shit there, maybe to avoid prosecution. But I don’t know that so I won’t assume it. 

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