“Beggars of Britain”
The word ‘beggars’ means someone who lives by asking others for money and food. Beggar is an insulting word and as well as using it in his title he uses it six times in the opening two lines. Straight away Parsons shows his hatred for the beggars by degrading them. Words such as ‘bastards’ express dirty images.
By this we also feel like we hate the beggars because of the dirty images that come in mind when Parsons insults them.
Parsons uses a variety of techniques in his article to encourage us to sympathize with his point. Parsons uses comparison as one of the techniques showing how London’s begging compares to third world begging.
“In Africa you see beggars with deformed legs…
“Old men with their eyes turned milky blue by river
Blindness led around by their grand children”.
Parsons shows how unnecessary begging in our country judging by the circumstances other beggars are faced with in other countries. Begging isn’t needed in England where hardly any beggars have similar circumstances to the ones in the third world. From this point we pick up that begging is irrelevant and we should ignore beggars.
Tony Parsons refers to his past and shows he is not a ruthless man who just hates beggars.
“I used to give, I used to give generously”
Parsons wants us to believe that he is a compassionate man and that he does have a heart.
“These people disgusted me but I still gave”
Parsons knew that what the beggars were doing was wrong, but still he claims he gave because he was compassionate, this technique is used cleverly to keep us the readers on his side.
Another of Parsons techniques is where he insults and shows his hatred for beggars.
“You could sleep with your sister before you went out begging”
Parsons says begging is immoral behaviour and you can see this because he would categorize begging after sleeping with your own sister. To Parsons ‘begging is like eating human flesh’ or ‘being cruel to animals’ and he has ‘grown to truly hate them’. With parsons only mentioning negative things about the beggars he just shows us the bad side of the beggars and builds on that until he convinced us that they are bad top to bottom.
With directly opposite views, Pilger portrays the beggars as being victims.
“He is a victim to thugs”
“He has little protection”
Pilger forces us to recognise how vulnerable these people are so we would feel sorry for his friend. Pilger adds that it’s not the homeless fault they ended that way, often it’s a result to a string of personal tragedies that destroys peoples lives. Divorce and loosing jobs are the two main factors that decide these people’s fates.
Pilger shifts the blame on homelessness to the government. He mocks the government with the use of irony.
“You will see a similar priority given to housing as to
Education and health”
The irony here is that education and health is already very poor and has not been dealt with seriously, so the homeless can expect little or no help from the government. John Pilger makes us gain the image that nothing is being done about homelessness or the homeless and that they are isolated people with no help what so ever.
Pilger includes statistics in his article to add weight to his argument.
“My friend is one of 80000 who are officially homeless”
When presented with such figures you suddenly feel you are very lucky you are not one of them.
Pilger puts himself in a beggar’s situation and reports from first hand experience.
“I once ended up in one of those hotels”
Pilger then goes on to say that how greedy the hotel owners were. Pilger say that the owner’s sole purpose is to ‘collect every penny of his guests state benefit’.
“Hotel owners are said to make £120 million a year”
The fact gained here is that the only reason some hotel owners give room for beggars is entirely for the money. Pilger shows that it’s just a lucrative profit for hotel owners to give these people rooms and that is has nothing to do with compassion.
John Pilger also gives his homeless ‘friend’ an identity. By calling the homeless man ‘friend’ he brings this unknown person closer to us and then the suffering feels real. We would normally feel sorry for a person we know more than a person we don’t know so that’s why Pilger give the man an identity, so that we feel more sorry the homeless man.
The two articles were persuasive but I found Tony Parsons article “Beggars of Britain” more powerful with a lot of derogatory terms used and sarcasm to make us laugh at the beggars.
