by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
Things didn’t improve after Cumbernauld came second to Hull in Crap Towns. ‘It seems the council of Cumbernauld have since woken up after coming second in the first Crap Towns book. Yep, the big shake-up has happened, and boy, what a shake-up! Instead of building a cinema, a decent shopping centre or anything else of worth for the residents, they decided to build “Fat Street”.
On this street, beside the ever-present Beefeater pub, we now have a new Pizza Hut, a new KFC, a new Burger King, a new tanning salon, a new Global Video and a new Domino’s Pizza. I thought today’s kids in Cumbernauld had no future with the lack of opportunity and soul in the place - how wrong I was! They can now stop off at Pizza Hut for a stuffed-crust pizza, then KFC for a quick snack, flash the fake ID for a sneaky few bottles of Hooch in the Beefeater, pop into Burger King for a whopper and fries, then into Global Video, hire out Gregory’s Girl [filmed in Cumbernauld], order a pizza from Domino’s to eat while watching it, nip in for a tan while they wait for the pizza to be cooked, and head home only to have to stop at the roundabout with severe chest pains followed by a cardiac arrest and a large dose of death. All at the ripe old age of fourteen.’
Then I went down to Hull, which didn’t have a very good reputation long before it was featured in our book. I found the Bransholme Estate on the outskirts of the city a far more frightening and desolate place than Blackbird Leys or Cumbernauld, largely because of its terrifying size. Locals complained of reduced bus services into Hull’s city centre, but because Bransholme has its own shopping mall its residents don’t actually need to go into the town itself, making the estate a modern-day ghetto of poverty on the edge of the city. Hull’s local council had been failing the people of Hull for many years, and most memorably spent hundreds of thousands of pounds installing central heating systems in homes on the estate that had already been earmarked for demolition. When I visited, great swathes of homes had already been flattened.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. The ubiquitous grilled crack-houses were everywhere, but so were well-tended gardens, brightly coloured flowerbeds and a few lonely garden gnomes.
A few years ago Hull was one of the richest councils in Britain after it sold a large part of its stake in Kingston Communications, the only privately owned telephone exchange in the country. The council then embarked on a £263 million spending frenzy; £40 million was spent on the local football club (just a year later the receivers were called in) and £32 million was spent filling a ‘funding gap’ in the council’s day-to-day spending. Within three years the council had managed to blow a grand total of £650 million and council tax bills were rising again.
I did an interview with Hull’s local TV news when it emerged in our book as the crappiest place to live in Britain. I asked a councillor on air about what was being done for the people living on the Bransholme Estate. She replied by pointing out how nice Hull’s brand-new aquarium, The Deep, was and how many tourists it was attracting to the city. But spending millions on an aquarium in a place like Hull is rather like installing a swimming pool with a gymnasium complex in a house without a roof. Later, at a bookshop event in the town, I met a youth worker from the estate. He’d seen the local news and pointed out that that was the first time anyone had ever asked such a question in the local media. He felt Bransholme had been dehumanized to the point that it had become an embarrassing and unmentionable part of Hull’s community.
After a damning report from the National Audit Office, Hull’s council got rid of many of its worst councillors and now things arc beginning to improve. Let’s hope they’ve learned some lessons. At the time of writing, the council has decided to sell its remaining shares in Kingston Communications, giving them another £200 million windfall. The people of Hull will be watching what it gets spent on closely this time.
It’s common sense that places like Cumbernauld and Bransholme shouldn’t exist in modern Britain. If being one of the five most powerful economic nations in the world can’t eradicate such levels of poverty and deprivation then perhaps a constantly expanding economy isn’t the holy grail of human development. The fact that places like Cumbernauld and Bransholme still exist proves that we live in a country where we have very little respect for one another. And a national sense of community doesn’t stand a chance if things are allowed to break down at a local level. Local and national communities then become fragmented. People hide at home in front of the television, scared out of their wits by hysterical news coverage that makes them fear for their lives if they walk out their front door, whether the reason for the fear is violent crime, terrorism or bird flu.
But it’s not all bad news. High levels of public fear are actually rather good for the ever-expanding economy, as Brian Dean, editor of the excellent anxietyculture.com, pointed out in Idler 25: ‘There are strong vested interests in keeping public anxiety at a high level,’ he wrote. ‘Anxious people make good consumers. They tend to eat and drink compulsively, need more distractions — newspapers, TV, etc. - and more external buttressing of their fragile self-image through lifestyle products and status symbols. Insurance companies and the whole financial services industry make billions from our insecurities. The unsubtle targeting of our fears is evident in adverts for vehicle recovery services, cars, alarms, security systems, mobile phones, private healthcare, chewing gum, deodorant and so on. Employers benefit if the workers fear losing their jobs as fearful people are less likely to complain or rebel. Studies show that people are more suggestible and compliant when anxious. Politicians quote “public fears” as justification for more freedom-eroding legislation. Insecure populations also show a tendency to elect authoritarian governments.’33
We’re certainly working harder than any other country in Europe to pay off the highest amount of personal debt owed by any country in the EU. That trillion pounds of unsecured debt we racked up through over-consumption will now have to be dealt with through more and more work, which gives us less and less time for our communities.
Every day, those of us in employment make a transaction to sell seven hours of our lives for a specific amount of money. For most of us time is only ever measured in money, and as we all know, you don’t get money for nothing so our communities, because they can’t pay us, can no longer expect any of our time.
This is something Sergeant Gary Brown, who has come up with a novel way of helping his community, noticed in the small town of Spilsby in Lincolnshire where he lives. ‘The demands placed upon you by people who don’t actually want to do anything for themselves are quite intense,’ he told me. ‘I had a lady who came to the police station the other day and said, “What are you doing about a school crossing patrol? Because it’s dangerous for the children.” And I said, “Well, we’re struggling to find anyone who’ll do it.” And she said, “Well, I think it’s disgusting,” and turned to leave. I said to her, “Do you work?” She said, “No.” So I said, “Why don’t you do it, then?” She looked horrified and left in a hurry.’
That’s the way you behave if you’re a consumer, because the customer, we are told, is always right. But we are not customers of our communities. We can’t allow our daily lives to be reduced to the working mindset of one transaction of consumption after another. Communities are not about economics. The break-up of our ‘way of life’, the lack of respect shown by the ‘youth of today’ and the ‘throw-away culture’ all came from somewhere, and in my view they came from the moment when every decision wc made stopped coming from us as citizens of this nation and came from us as consumers of this nation instead. If you apply the logic of ‘the customer is always right’ to a nation, you’ll find yourself living in a country where everyone deals in their own self-interest rather than the interest of the places they call home. And if your community begins to collapse then everyone living in it loses out, regardless of their income, the status symbols they’ve acquired or the height of the fence they have built around themselves for protection. A community where everyone is interested only in themselves will inevitably break dow
n and people will begin to feel sidelined, frustrated, left out and angry. Those left adrift may even start feeling a little anti-social. Well, I would. Wouldn’t you?
The more our government embraces the corporate vision of Britain, the more we become customers of our country rather than its citizens. As consumers we are always looking for a bargain, but getting a bargain from your country is not the same as getting a bargain from a large corporation. When you get a bargain from your country your community will always bear the brunt of the cost. When you get a bargain from a large corporation someone else’s community, increasingly one in the developing world, bears the cost instead.
The government can’t have it both ways. They can’t sit back and allow the economic circumstances for anti-social behaviour to flourish and then hammer their fists on the table and talk about ‘respect’ when our communities inevitably break down. I believe that by allowing a market philosophy to invade every facet of our lives our government is directly responsible for the fragmentation of our communities. People are uninterested in politics for a reason. If voting turnouts are anything to go by we have given up looking for a leader to guide us out of this mess because we know deep down that the answers lie locally, in doing things for ourselves. The struggle all of us face is regaining control of our time so that we can actually fulfil our roles, rights and responsibilities as citizens and members of communities.
It may sound absurd, but the medieval way of life was, in some respects, far more civilized than the way we live today. Sergeant Gary Brown is the man behind the ‘Knight School’ project designed to prevent anti-social behaviour by teaching children about the rndpc nf medieval chivalry and their role in a community. When you first hear about it, it sounds a ludicrous approach, but in the two years since his project began crime rates in the area have halved. ‘Everything we do has been based around the whole idea of returning to the concept of a medieval society, one in which people rely less on their local authorities and more on themselves and their neighbours to turn around their town.’
Gary holds Knight School sessions for local children aged between six and eight and teaches them about courtesy, manliness, nutrition, health, behaviour, respect and their place in a community. ‘The parents are actually the most important part,’ he told me when I visited him to find out how Knight School had begun to reshape his home town. ‘I tell them that they must engage in what their children are doing. That I’m going to teach their children not to swear and if they are planning on swearing at home then I don’t want their child coming to Knight School. The problem for the parents is that the five- or six-year-olds see their friends walking away from Knight School with swords, badges, shields, tabards and medals and they all want to come. We’ve had a few situations where children couldn’t come because their parents weren’t up to standard, and then suddenly the child has a lever on their parents and can say to them, “I want you to behave, so I can go to Knight School.” Our experience from the last two years is that the parents actually change their behaviour far more than the child because the parents’ level of understanding is higher. We tell the parents that if they smoke, drink and gamble then their child is more likely to as well. And all parents love their children, so they are prepared to change to make their children happy. So we’re engaging with parents, which is very important.’
Session one is an introduction. Gary’s approach is that as the children are entering a new world they should be given new identities. The theory behind that is that because he’s a policeman he will inevitably recognize some criminal family names and if a five-year-old appeared with a name he knew then psychologically it might change the way he treated the child. So he never allows himself to find out their real identities. As soon as they arrive they are given names like Galahad, Lancelot and Guinevere, and that’s all he ever knows them as. ‘They’re not allowed to use their real names at any time and that gives them a whole new start. Anything that was in the past is in the past, and they’re looking into a bright new future. Then they get given their Knight School toothbrush, and that’s because it’s the first thing they do in the morning and the last thing they do at night. It means they go to bed dreaming of it and wake up living it. It’s quite interesting as toothbrushes go, because it’s got the logo of Knight School on it and the bristles are in the shape of a shield. They’re not allowed to choose the colour because humility is part of the training, and they can’t choose their name either. They get it and they have to live with it. Some of them don’t like their names because they’re just plain horrible, but they can’t complain because they’re not allowed to.
‘In the seven other sessions we go through their nutrition - we were teaching nutrition to them and their parents long before Jamie Oliver - their health, what pride, courtesy and respect are, and what constitutes good behaviour and bad behaviour. We go through all those things in a very structured way. Then at the end of the course they are all given a script to learn, and at the closing ceremony in a local castle they stand up on a podium and recite their own personal part of the course. At the very end, the children are knighted.
‘The schools are always amazed by the transformation in the children, especially the ones who are difficult to control. But they’re dealing with thirty children at any one time in school; I’m dealing with twelve. I am able to give them all, pretty much, my full attention. That makes them feel important as human beings, and if they feel like that they will do anything for you.’
Sergeant Brown’s ideas don’t stop when the children have ‘passed out’ from Knight School either. ‘Some of the first kids to go to Knight School are now about eleven, so we devised this thing called the Green Knight for them to move on to. The Green Knight is a method to help them engage in community life. They pick a project and get a Green Knight workbook that includes the “magic formula”. The magic formula is that they must be motivated, they must analyse what the problem is, they must set themselves a goal, they must innovate - to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again - and then they must communicate what it is that they’ve done. We produced a lovely workbook - well, I would say that because I made it, but everyone who reads it says what a fabulous thing it is. Anyway, these children get this and they send it off to the Green Knight, this mythical character, who then sends them their certificate. Now I’m the Green Knight, so I see what these children will do to get a certificate.
They start picking up litter and doing all sorts of things to improve where they live. It’s been wonderful. What I’ve noticed, though, is that “officials” will start throwing things like health and safety at me, risk assessments, that sort of thing. One councillor even raised the issue that the more we pick up our own litter the less the district council will do it for us. The problem is that people will actually listen to him and say, “He’s got a good point there.” So then people see no point in picking up litter if they know someone else is going to do it for them. That’s the kind of mentality we’re up against.
‘I also wrote a book called The Road to Camelot which outlines a lot of this stuff. The aim is to get that book to every single child in Britain, but I thought I’d better start by getting one to every child in Spilsby. What I found was that if an official authority gives these books away, like a school or the police, there’s less likelihood that the children and their parents will actually read and digest them. So now these books are given out by the British Legion and various other local clubs and societies instead. They’re 50p each. As soon as they were coming from their own community rather than being imposed by an official authority, everyone started snapping them up.
‘When the children started doing the Green Knight workbook I found that a lot of their literary skills were really poor, so we introduced the Dragon - the Pen-Dragon. He’s a dragon and he’s got a pen. After Uther Pendragon, of course, King Arthur’s father. The Pen-Dragon is a writing competition we hold here for children to win the Pen-Dragon award. And there are more badges they can earn. We do presentations for
them in school and that has driven up the way they write because they want to earn a badge.’
I asked Gary about the results he’d seen so far. ‘My experience here suggests that it has a major impact on crime figures,’ he replied, ‘but we don’t really understand why that is, other than that for every single child you meet you also meet their mum, dad - if they’ve got a dad at home - grandparents, aunts and uncles, who all engage with you as a policeman who is helping their child. So that’s been a very positive effect. The sense of community has really changed and I’m sure that has to be a part of it. It used to take me ten minutes to walk from one side of Spilsby to the other, now it takes me about an hour and a half. You’ve got to bear in mind that this is just one of about thirty measures we’ve put in place. The Knight School images are in pre-school and they are outside every pub here. It’s all part of a twenty-year strategy to improve behaviour so the kids will grow up with these images and these ideas around them. Everything about it is focused on citizenship.’
I’d read a few articles in the newspapers about Knight School but none them had got much beyond the image of children walking around with swords. Gary’s excellent work was regularly being portrayed as something of an eccentric joke. I wondered if he found the media’s coverage of his project frustrating. ‘God, yes. It doesn’t matter which newspaper or TV programme you’re talking about, every one I’ve spoken to professes to be the voice of the people and to give out real news. Then they get down here and without fail they all just want to see a child dressed up in a knight’s outfit. That’s all they’re interested in. They don’t really want to report on what’s behind it all, they just want that image. But I’ve found that the public actually want the opposite. The public want an answer to their problems. They want a real-time solution to what’s happening in their communities. They understand the concepts behind what I’m trying to do and they can see beyond the glitz of a child in a knight’s outfit. The media just don’t understand that the public are actually interested in the ethos behind what it is we’re trying to do.’ Towards the end of our time together I asked Gary what he thought of ASBOs. He went quiet for a moment. It was a question he was being asked a great deal, and as a policeman it was a difficult one for him to answer. ‘Someone said to me recently that when it comes to modern behaviour we’re travelling in a ship full of holes,’ he said. ‘ASBOs may well fill a few holes temporarily, but what we’re doing here in Spilsby is building a brand-new ship.’