- Rotterdam, last year: 716 fines.
- The city of Almelo just made it illegal to sleep outdoors.
- The Hague, last year until December: 643 fines.
The malicious stigmatization of poverty and homelessness is becoming just as bad in the Netherlands as it is in Tory England.
Here’s a difference: If such cases end up in court, Dutch judges almost always dismiss them.
Lawyer Ineke van den Brûle: Some people are fined multiple times within a mere few minutes.
Homeless people in the Netherlands are also being fined for not having ID on them or for hanging around.
What this reminds me of is John Stuart Mill’s assertion that the sight of some people is so aesthetically unpleasing to better-off and able-bodied others that the latter must be protected from that.
That concerns Dickensian or Victorian England, in case you didn’t know that and John Stuart Mill was an immensely privileged Englishman as was Jeremy Bentham, the co-founder of the English way of thinking called “utilitarianism”. France briefly experienced a similar development but managed to nip it in the bud.
(I discussed these two gentlemen and their ideas in my book “We need to talk about this”.)
