by Owen Jones
Combined with plans to cap benefits to workless families at a maximum of £500 per week, low-income people face eviction from relatively richer areas, forcing them into effective ghettos. According toestimates by London councils, as many as 82,000 households--or a quarter of a million people--were at risk of losing their homes or being forced to move. This would be the biggest population movement in Britain since World War II.'I have been in housing for thirty years and Ihave never seen anything like this in terms of projected population movements,' said one senior London housing official. 'London is going to be a bit like Paris, with the poor living on the periphery. In many boroughs in inner London in three or four years there will be no poor people living in the private rented sector ... it is like something from the nineteenth century.'
But it wasn't just the government's opponents who saw social cleansing at the heart of these plans. One unnamed Conservative minister compared the policy to the Highland Clearances-the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century evictions of small farmers from the Scottish Highlands-claiming that it would lead to an exodus of Labour voters from London. Indeed, Shaun Bailey, a former Conservative candidate who was defeated in Hammersmith at the 2010 general election, had argued that the Tories would struggle to win inner-city seats 'because Labour has filled them with poor people'. Such was the outrage over the government's all-too-clear agenda that even London's mayor, the Conservative Boris Johnson, came out publicly to say that he would not accept 'Kosovo-style social cleansing' of the capital."
Taken together, this is a toxic brew. Large numbers of people without secure work; low-paid work that fails to give people a comfortable existence; some of the highest levels of poverty in Western Europe; and millions left without affordable housing. In some of the poorest workingclass communities in Britain, each of these crises is felt still more acutely. With all the misery, frustration and hopelessness that accompany them, is it any wonder if other social problems arise?
Imagine being a poor working-class youth in Britain today. Like one in three children, you will have grown up in poverty, lacking many of the things others take for granted: toys, days out, holidays, good food. You spent your childhood in a shabby, overcrowded house or flat, with little if any space to do your own thing. Your parents--or parent-may have done their best, but they have had to deal with the stress oflacking enough money to get by, either working in a monotonous low-paid job or having no job whatsoever.
There are few, if any, decent local jobs for you to look forward to. Indeed, one in four young people are 'Neets' at some stage: that is, sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who are 'not in education, employment or training'. And, of course, the disappearance of industrial apprenticeships has left few options for many yourg working-class men. 'It is well established that industrial restructuring has played a significant part in the restructuring of working-class youth transitions to adulthood,' says Professor Robert MacDonald. With so little hope for so many young people, how can anyone be surprised at the prevalence of anti-social behaviour in many deprived, working-class communities?
of course this a problem that can easily be exaggerated. 'You hear, "Oh, they're all hoodies" --but they're not!' a retired Birmingham pattemmaker told me. 'I used to hang around with a gang oflads. I used to wear a three-quarter-length coat. Winklepickers and jeans you could hardly get into. I was called a ruffian. We survived! And I'm sure this generation will grow up and the next generation will have something different that people will be moaning about. No, I don't think they're a bad lot really. You might get one or two, but then again you always did!'
MacDonald agrees that it is 'an age-old theme'. As he sees it, 'swathes of ordinary, working-class young people get branded, corralled, herded, moved on, labelled as "trouble" simply for passing their evening leisure time in unremarkable, un-troublesome friendship groups on the streets. This street-comer society was the dominant form of leisure for ordinary working-class young people in our studies. Wasn't it ever thus? Was for me!'
And yet the approach of politicians and the media has been to encourage fear and loathing of working-class youth, making no attempt to understand the root causes of anti-social behaviour where it occurs. of course, that does not stop the bad behaviour of a small minority being a nuisance-s-or worse--for other members of the community. But, as Ashington showed, all too often it can be a cry of despair: of anguish at the lack of a future, and a feeling that there is nothing to lose.
Boredom is undoubtedly another factor. Unfettered free markets have been allowed to dismantle our local communities, bit by bit. Places where young people--and the rest of that community, for that matter-s-could congregate have been disappearing. According to the government's Valuation Office Agency, the number of sports and social clubs fell by 55 per cent in the thirteen years of New Labour rule. Post offices were down by 39 per cent; swimming pools by 21 per cent; pubs by 7 per cent; and public libraries by 6 per cent. The sorts of things that have flourished in their place hardly foster a sense of community, or give young people something to do. Betting shops and casinos went up by 39 per cent and 27 per cent respectively, for example. Little wonder young people have been forced to create their own entertainment-e-or that a minority have resorted to anti-social behaviour out of boredom, despair, or both.
Nothing sums up the blight of anti-social behaviour in the minds of many than teenage gangs wearing hoodies and loitering menacingly on street comers. But, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found, gangs can be about teenagers grouping together for protection, looking out for each other, and even avoiding trouble. Looking at gang culture in six areas, researchers discovered a strong link between territorial behaviour and poorer communities. Getting involved with a gang provided some young people with fun, excitement and support they otherwise lacked. Furthermore, the charity revealed 'connections between poor housing conditions and often difficult family backgrounds, and territor- iality. Territorial behaviour appeared for some to be a product of deprivation, a lack of opportunities and attractive activities, limited aspirations and an expression of identity.' Additionally, gangs' could be understood as a coping mechanism for young people living in poverty'.
It is common to hear right-wing commentators and politicians blame bad parenting for anti-social behaviour among working-class youth. Simon Heffer, one of the country's leading right-wing columnists, put it to me that we need to be 'punishing--and Imean punishing quite severely-bad parenting. Imean, you've got cases of children growing up engaging in criminality who are below the age of criminal responsibility. Lock up their parents! Put the children into care, and have them make sure the children are properly brought up and educated in care.'
Contrary to this view, successive reports by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have found that in reality, parents often playa hugely positive role in tough working-class areas. ;There is a widespread view that anti-social behaviour by young people can simply be blamed on bad parenting,' observed Peter Seaman, the co-author of one report. 'Yet the parents we interviewed described sophisticated strategies to minimize their children's exposure to danger and to guard them against temptations to go off the rail's.
Gangs can provide a form of the solidarity that has leaked out of increasingly fragmented working-class communities. To soaring numbers of young people with bleak prospects, gangs can give life meaning, structure, and reward. No wonder they have appealed to some workingclass children who have grown up in poverty and have a lack of faith in their future. Indeed, as one investigation putit,they provide an opportunity for 'career advancement' through risk-taking and criminal activity-very often the only kind of success young people believe is available to them. Because of'the current heavy emphasis in schools on academic success', some young people looked' elsewhere for validation'
Yet the New Labour era saw a crackdown on the symptoms, rather than the causes, of anti-social behaviour. The former government's approach--such as issuing thousands of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, or ASBOs--served to magnify the problem in p
eople's minds and criminalized the young people responsible, without helping in any way to turn their lives around. And to our shame, there are more young people behind bars in England and Wales than anywhere else in Western Europe. The numbers of young people aged between ten and seventeen with a custodial sentence trebled between 1991 and 2006. But prison most certainly does not rehabilitate: some three-quarters of young people re-offend after release.
New Labour's approach to crime as a whole was authoritarian, disregarding the main root cause: poverty. Before he became Labour leader, the rising star that was Tony Blair won plaudits by committing to a policy of 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'. But, as Blair's political secretary John McTernan has admitted, New Labour's strategy ended up as 'tough on crime, tough on criminals'." Between 1993 and 20 I0, England and Wales's prison population nearly doubled, from 44,500 to around 85,000.
What is startling about these figures is that the prison population was spiralling out of control even as crime itself was falling. During the 20I0 general election, the Tories put allegedly soaring crime rates at the forefront of their 'Broken Britain' narrative. Their figures were a myth. According to the British Crime Survey, crime fell from 18.5 million offences in 1993 to 10.7million by 2009. This success was not achieved because more people were thrown into prison, as many New Labour politicians would have us believe. Indeed, a secret government memo leaked when Labour was in power in 2006 suggested that' 80 per cent of [the] recent decrease in crime [is] due to economic factors ..., Or, consider a 2005 study by the Crime and Society Foundation which argued that escalating murder rates in the 1980s were the legacy of recession and mass unemployment. Indeed, as the economic boom that began in the early 1990stook off, crime rates fell right across the Western world. Even the Conservative-led coalition that took power after the 2010 general election accepted a link between crime and underlying economic factors.
People have got more scared of crime even as the actual levels have gone down, but this has everything to do with sensationalist journalism and inflammatory rhetoric on the part of politicians. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that your risk of becoming a victim of crime depends a great deal on your class. The British Crime Survey shows that working-class people are significantly more likely to suffer from crime than middle-class people. Working-class people are often reproached for being authoritarian when it comes to law-and-order issues-but of course you are more likely to worry if the risk of crime looms larger in your community.
There is little doubt that at the root of much crime in Britain is the illegal drugs industry. When many people think of council estates, they imagine a dirty stairwell littered with hypodermic needles. The truth is that people of all classes have experimented with drugs at some stage in their lives. Millions of teenagers, 'forking class and middle class, have smoked a joint; and a very considerable percentage of young people have swallowed an ecstasy tablet on a night out. 'Looking at the available evidence, in terms of teenagers and young people, there is not an obvious link amongst that group between socio-economic status and levels of drug and alcohol misuse,' says Martin Barnes, chief executive of drugs charity DrugScope. Indeed, cocaine has a long-established reputation as the middle-class drug of choice. A House of Commons Select Committee report recently denounced the fact that 'it seems to have become more socially acceptable and seen as a "safe", middle-class rug. But when it comes to problematic drug use, the differences are striking.'
The government Advisory Panel on the Misuse of Drugs published a report a couple of years ago, and it concluded that when you look at levels of drug misuse with older age groups, there was a very clear link with areas of deprivation and unemployment,' says Martin Barnes. This was particularly striking when you looked at working-class communities devastated by economic crisis. 'The experience in some communities in the 1990's was that in those areas that were hit quite hard by unemployment, particularly young people's unemployment, we did see levels of drug misuse increase, not just heroin.'
Barnes is careful to say that, of course, other factors come into play, not least the rise of rampant consumerism in the 1980s and the greater availability of drugs. But he was in no doubt that people often made the leap from being a bit experimental with drugs to full-blown, problem. atic drug use, either through despair or as a coping mechanism.
You can see why drugs have strengthened their grip over some of the communities that never recovered from the battering they got under Thatcherism. The tragedy of hard drugs is most visible in Britain's crippled mining villages. 'I honestly think that there wouldn't have been half the drug addicts and stuff like that if the mines hadn't closed,' former Nottinghamshire miner Adrian Gilfoyle told me.
A few years ago, Labour MP John Mann launched an inquiry into heroin use in the former mining community of'Bassetlaw. It concluded that a health crisis comparable to a smallpox epidemic was raging in the heart of some of Britain's former coalfields. 'People growing up in the coalfields lack the sense ofidentity afforded to their parents and grandparents who were part of a stable and prosperous mining industry,' the report said. 'The strongest substance used in these communities was beer, and stable employment allowed most a good standard of living.' With the collapse of the mining industry, 'there is a need to escape', and heroin in these areas was associated with a need to 'get away from it all'. 'Mining villages are Trainspotting without the glamour,' was its dismal conclusion.
Modem Conservatives blame many of these social problems on the excessive growth of the state. But they also favour another explanation: the breakdown of the traditional family. Single-parent families in particular have found themselves in the firing line. The working-class single mum is, after all, one of the most reviled 'chav' icons. Fiona Weir, of single parents' charity Gingerbread, enumerates some of the notions associated with the people she represents:' "scroungers", "spongers", "lazy", "doesn't want to work", "happy on benefits" that group of adjectives. It's very pervasive and it's very directly relevant to a lot of the welfare reform debates that are playing out.'
To get to the heart of these stereotypes, Gingerbread conducted a wide-ranging study into the lives of single parents in modern Britain. 'What we found bore no relationship to the stereotype in the majority of the cases,' she says. 'And what came through is an extraordinary, pal- pable sense of anger about the stereotyping.' You would not think it from the way they are popularly portrayed, but 57 per cent of single parents actually have a job.
Rebecca is a young, confident single mother with two kids who lives on a Birmingham estate. She is lucky because she has a job she can juggle with being the sole carer of her children. She points to her eight- year-old daughter. 'The job I chose is a teaching assistant, which fits in around them. We're at the same school, so all the holidays we have together. I chose my job purposefully to fit around the children, and then my other one's at senior school, and her holidays are obviously the same, so work is fantastic for me. But I know that other single mums struggle because when you have the six-week summer holiday and Easter, and whatever else, and you have to find someone to look after your kids.'
Despite the difficulties involved, most single parents want to work. According to the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey, 84 per cent of unemployed single parents want to either get a job or to study. But single parents face attack whatever they do. 'We get a phrase used a lot by single parents, which is "damned if I do, damned if I don't",' says Weir. 'Because if you're on benefits you're somehow seen as a lazy scrounger, but if you go out to work, you're somehow seen as neglect- ing your kids and not knowing where they are while they run around wild.' Itis not shiftlessness keeping many single parents from working, but a number of barriers that are difficult to overcome: like having a job compatible with single-handedly raising a kid, and affordable, accessi- ble childcare. As Weir argues, stigmatizing single parents undermines their self-confidence and does nothing to help them get a job.
The Tories often argue that family structure is on
e of the major deciding factors in whether a child does well at school and in later life. They are on a factual collision course with a recent study by the Children's Society, which showed that conflict in the family has ten times more of an impact on a child's upbringing. 'The evidence base shows that most children from single-parent families turn out fine,' says Fiona Weir. 'There are poorer outcomes for a significant minority, but when you analyse them, they correlate very, very clearly with things like poverty and conflict. And you get similarly poor outcomes in children from couple families that have similar levels of poverty and conflict.'
When people think of single mothers, it is often teenage girls that spring to mind. But in reality, only one in fifty single mothers are under eighteen. The average age for a single parent is thirty-six, and over half had the children while married. Even so, there is no denying that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe. It is also impossible to deny the class dimension of this issue. Although the numbers overall are low, teenagers from manual backgrounds are eight times more likely to become mothers than those from a professional background. The regions that top the teenage pregnancy tables are those areas where industry was destroyed and low-paid service sector jobs have filled the vacuum. Why?
If doctor-turned-author Max Pemberton, writing in the Daily Telegraph, istobe believed, it is because for 'children from working-class families, where aspiration is considered middle class, choices in life consist of becoming a celebrity, working in a shop or becoming a mum. The Holy Grail is ready access to a council flat and state benefits, which is precisely what having a baby gives you. ,21As Fiona Weir points out, this unpleasant populist caricature of the crafty, benefit-seeking teenage mum is a myth. 'We come into contact with thousands of single parents but somehow we just don't meet ones who fit this stereotype. How we are managing to avoid them, I don't know. As for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, they can't get the keys to a council house at that age. They either live at home or they go into supported accommodation.'