Programmes and visions of urban regeneration and beautification, present in many of the most affluent cities in the world, have raised serious questions about social exclusion, citizenship, and the plight of the urban poor. A common feature of the politics of this movement is a crackdown on so-called ‘aggressive beggars’ and others types of disorderly people. Indeed, demands for removal of people begging from city pavements have become a tired cliche of urban politics today. Unlike in England and Wales and in North American cities such as Toronto or New York, Scottish cities, in forging their own urban renaissance, are without one of the main tools of ‘cleaning up the streets’. Since 1991, begging in Scotland has been legal, a situation that has not sat well with officials in cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen who have argued that those begging are a serious public threat that requires the police to be armed with vagrancy-type law.

This chapter offers an analysis of the campaign to re-criminalise begging by City of Edinburgh officials in the late 1990s, and the response of the then Scottish office. In arguing for a new begging offence, Edinburgh officials exercised familiar tropes in depicting those begging as a public menace: vague appeals to public safety and ‘community’, the protection of tourist and consumer dollars, and aspirations for a ‘world class’, cosmopolitan city where visitors are not distracted by unpleasant reminders of poverty and social inequality (Helms, forthcoming). What is notable about this case, is how the response of the then Scottish Office (now the Scottish Executive) represented an unusually tolerant position when compared to other jurisdictions: citing a number of legal and practical concerns the Scottish Executive declined to allow Edinburgh to promote a begging byelaw, a position that has been reiterated in more general terms earlier this year (2006) to the City of Aberdeen that argued that a criminal offence was needed to deal with the presence of those begging.

We begin by briefly examining how anti-begging ordinances, as an aspect of a much wider ‘criminalisation of urban policy’, effectively reduce the homeless to the status of ‘bare life’.