If you are thinking of a change of career in 2005, you might consider this, advertised in various newspapers last year by Glasgow city council’s social work department. “Supported Accommodation Service for individuals who are likely to continue drinking. This Service [their capital letter] will be unregistered and will provide a high standard of accommodation for service users with varying complexities of need, including individuals who have expressed a view to continue drinking.

“Providers must demonstrate the ability to develop services that meet this range of needs, and will be required to have a clear policy on working with people who demonstrate challenging behaviour and non-engagement with services. A needs-led, person-centred approach coupled with a commitment to the values of inclusion are intrinsic to the delivery of the service.”

There was a time when this kind of job specification appeared only in satirical magazines, which when read by Scots would have generated howls of laughter and be passed round to their friends as a splendid illustration of bonkers Islington Guardian-reader mentality, the kind of drippy, dippy do-goodish verbiage that would never be tolerated up here.

Cut through the politically correct hedging and you find that what the council really wants is an unregistered dosshouse for habitual and unrepentant drunks and dropouts who are likely to be violent and don’t want to be helped. An advertisement of 15 words would have sufficed. At nine lines, political correctness is very expensive.

But, more than that, it strikes an odd note. Nobody with any sense of decency would suggest that the drunks and dropouts should not receive food and shelter, even if they do exhibit “challenging behaviour” and are extremely uncooperative. But is this all they should be given?

An unremarked-upon effect of the almost hysterically non-judgmental approach that all councils adopt nowadays is that they find themselves preaching a pernicious kind of passive acceptance towards selected categories of people. For example, while smoking, smacking, hunting and the middle classes are excoriated, the “values of inclusion” specifically exclude any idea that the homeless, and particularly the drunken homeless, might be encouraged to re-engage with society.

If any idea of benevolent rescue crept into a tender for the supported accommodation contract, the wannabe service providers would soon find themselves back on the pavement with a stiff lecture on the new creed of municipal non-judgmentalism ringing in their ears. In the current lexicon of council-speak, the words “benevolent rescue” are outlawed since they suggest an imposition of values, which the authorities, with a scrupulousness never exhibited in relation to anything else, abhor.

Yet, when confronted with people who have just about fallen over the edge, a civilised society surely does not just dole out soup, point to a bed and tiptoe away, piously washing its hands. It has to be rather more responsible than that.

Homelessness, drunkenness and general desperation are not incurable diseases that we just smile and accept. They arise through a mixture of character and circumstance, both of which can, up to a point, be changed. Being non-judgmental, in the case of the homeless and destitute, floats dangerously close to social irresponsibility, something that, up until now, would have been as alien to Scots as Morris dancing.

Perhaps it would not matter if being pathologically non-judgmental was successful, but it is not. One of the most effective providers of help to the homeless in the UK and elsewhere is the Emmaus movement. Its motto, “Giving people a bed and a reason to get out of it”, could not be less like the council advertisement.

The movement was founded in France in 1949 by a Catholic priest known as Abbé Pierre. Georges, the first Emmaus Companion, summed up the real problems of the homeless destitute with accuracy born of long experience. “Whatever else he [the Abbé] might have given me — money, a home, somewhere to work,” he said, “I’d have still tried to kill myself again. What I was missing, and what he offered, was something to live for.”

The “something” to which Georges referred was the code of values on which all Emmaus communities are based: sharing, working for others in greater need and self-respect. Emmaus communities are not very interested in jargon. Nor are the homeless helped in a values-free zone. Rather the opposite. The companions find succour and solace precisely because it is assumed that, as human beings, while their own values may have gone a little askew, they are still capable of recognising how important values — real values and not just the mantra of “inclusion” — are.

Reading the testimony of companions, some of whom hit more than rock bottom with self-abuse from drink and drugs, it is perfectly clear that they need those around them to articulate and affirm values just as much as they need medical or psychiatric attention. Offering help that is free of values is like offering a bloody mary without the vodka: the essential ingredient is missing.

It is paradoxical that the advertisement with which I began was printed at about the time when Emmaus, after a long search for a suitable site, began to build a home for a community in Ellesmere Street, Glasgow. When it is finished this autumn, the homeless people who gravitate towards it will begin the Emmaus work of refurbishing donated furniture and household goods.

More importantly, by subscribing to the same set of values, some will also achieve the stability and sense of belonging that will allow them to begin living again, while those who “express a view to continue drinking” will be gently encouraged to change.

To the strange creatures who concoct council advertisements, this may seem bizarre. To the rest of us, it should be a cause to rejoice. In a world gone mad, some pockets of sanity remain and one of them is in Scotland.

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