AN encounter last year with a Glasgow beggar still makes me smile. It happened just before Christmas as I stood outside a city centre wine bar trying to shelter a vulnerable cigarette from the rain. The tavern was one of those where, on being presented with the bill for a large Sauvignon, your first instinct is to protest that it was a glass you had, not a bottle.

Amidst the festive throngs heading towards Queen Street or Central station there was jagged movement. It came from a shilpit figure which stopped here and there to make small and unsuccessful petitions. I knew he would reach me in a few minutes and there would be a request of a cigarette and a light and money to help with his bus fare.

“Big man,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. Ah’m no lookin’ fur ma bus fare hame; ah wouldnae insult yir intelligence. See that off-licence at the tapay the road? Well I’d like a couple of Carlsbergs outay it, which I can do if you could spare me a coupla quid.”

He had me at “intelligence” and so he got his money and a few cigarettes which, to be honest, I’d volunteered to him to make me feel better about the lies I’d soon need to tell my cardiologist. The Simon Community estimates that there can be anything between 60 and 80 people begging on the streets of Glasgow on an average day. I’ve grown to accept begging as a fact of life in Glasgow, a city that boasts of possessing the busiest retail sector outside London’s Bond Street and from which, on a clear day, you can just about see the gateways to some of Europe’s most deprived neighbourhoods. They don’t mention that in the tourist brochures, though.

Curiously, despite the long-time existence of begging on the city’s streets, there seems to be a backlash against it. Perhaps people are simply losing patience with being badgered by pitiful entreaties. Perhaps we are sickening to the little pangs of guilt that some of us must feel even as we hand over the detritus of our pockets.

Last week saw the results of research by Community Safety Glasgow (CSG) into the nature and scale of begging on the city’s streets. It revealed that more than one in three businesses believed begging had a serious impact on their business. A similar number of customers questioned reported being “significantly affected” by begging. Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, in a response by its Chief Executive, Stuart Patrick said this amounted to a “strongly negative” reaction. What did he think would be the response: singing and dancing?

In an admittedly rudimentary survey of friends and colleagues this week devoid of any scientific authority, I asked them what they felt when they encountered begging on the street. Their reactions to begging mirrored my own. They ranged from feeling compassion for a fellow human being driven to scavenge on our scraps to a sense of despair that these people seemed eternally beyond the reach of our society. Finally, there was guilt … guilt at the knowledge their alms would be spent on drink or drugs and the guilt that comes from knowing that you don’t really care enough to do much more. None of them though, had a clue what the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce does beyond organise self-serving dinners and lunches where they and their partnership agencies – a list that contains all the usual veterans of the business leadership – discuss footfall percentages and empowering strategic outcomes, or strategically empowering outcomes (I can never remember which). Mr Patrick’s considered response to the findings of CSG seemed to me devoid of compassion or a desire to seek out the reasons why once-proud men and women are forced into the cold to beg for their very existence.

It’s potentially damaging to business, he says, and some customers simply don’t like the look of it. I doubt very much if many of us, on encountering a beggar, begin to worry about the negative impact he might be having on poor Mr Marks and Mr Spencer and their next door neighbour Mr Lewis. “What a shame. Those poor flagship retail emporiums shouldn’t have to put up with all this begging on their doorsteps; something must be done.”

I wonder how many among those businessmen and, ahem … strategic thinkers in Glasgow Chamber of Commerce pay above the Living Wage, at present set at a rate that wouldn’t get you a lock-up in Possilpark? How many offer meaningful modern apprenticeships and recognise trade unions? How many reward themselves with large bonuses while issuing shop-floor redundancies whenever there’s a slight wobble in the share price? How many have scrapped final-salary pension schemes? And how many belong to organisations that hide their profits in offshore pirate islands to avoid paying tax?

All of this matters because such activities feed into the pattern of despair that leads to a life on the streets. Do many of us ever pause for a moment and consider that these wretched souls once belonged to sons and daughters; fathers and mothers; uncles and aunts?

Few of us are more than a wrong turning or an unwise decision from destitution: a divorce perhaps; sudden unemployment; the shadow of mental illness or the spectre of alcoholism that runs through generations of families in Glasgow.

I’d urge Mr Patrick not to take any of this personally; I take my share of responsibility for the chasm that exists between easy words and hard action when it comes to addressing this issue.

If his attitude is a questionable one then so is mine. I’d urge him and his members, though, to consider inviting the men and women who beg outside their premises for a free Christmas lunch in George Square this year and to listen to the stories that brought them to their front doors. I’d be happy to attend and to chip in for it.

The Community Safety Glasgow study into begging coincided with figures released by National Records of Scotland, showing that suicides rose for the first time in six years: up eight per cent year on year. How many of those 728 who killed themselves had previously been begging on the streets of Glasgow?

Elsewhere, the Retail Sales Index for Scotland reported that the value of retail sales in Scotland rose by 1.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year. Perhaps the numbers of beggars on our streets aren’t hitting trade as much as the upstanding members of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce think.