It is always the same. As you turn off the dual carriageway and first see the estate in the distance, it appears so neat and clean and comforting, all those tidy rows of red-brick semis with square patches of green and the occasional neighbourhood store, the very model of a public housing project; then, as you arrive on the edge of the estate, you start to see the vengeful graffiti on the walls, the sodden scraps of litter and moulding mattresses and humping mongrels on the grass; and when, finally, a door opens and you step inside and start to see and hear the people there, you sink into a world of infinite difficulty.
It is exactly the same with the politics of social exclusion. From the vast distance of Westminster, it is easy to believe the great simplicities – that poverty has been caused by unemployment and can, therefore, be cured by moving the jobless from welfare back to work; that the problems of housing estates can be alleviated by improving the quality of their housing stock; that single parents might be freed from their trap by making their wages higher than their benefits. The reality is that there is good sense and even political courage in all these ideas, but they are distant from the truth and horribly, hopelessly inadequate to deal with the infinite complexity of what has happened on these estates.
The key point here is that the eighties and early nineties saw the birth of a poverty in this country which was not simply on a scale which had not been seen for more than 40 years but which was also of a kind which simply had never been seen here at all. This new poverty is complex.
This government deserves enormous credit for reversing the devious dishonesty of their predecessors who refused even to admit the existence of poverty in Britain and who manipulated statistics and redefined language to maintain the grotesque pretence that everyone was better off as a result of their efforts. To acknowledge the issue; to allow the Prime Minister to make a personal pledge to improve the lot of the poorest; to set up a Cabinet unit specifically devoted to attacking social exclusion: all this amounts to a significant progress. And yet, this government’s strategy will certainly fail.
To understand this, it is helpful to think back to the last great outbreak of poverty in this country, in the 1930s, and to address the question which is asked most often by right-wing commentators, for example by Peregrine Worsthorne in the New Statesman last December: “Poverty and unemployment do not necessarily result in depravity and moral collapse. They did not do so in the 1930s, when unemployment was far worse than it is today and social welfare incomparably less generous. In those days, communities did not collapse and teenage gangs did not gain the upper hand… No churches were vandalised in the depression black spots. Quite the reverse. What has happened to change this?”
He is right. There is depravity and moral collapse out there. There is a terrible temptation, to which many on the left have succumbed, to pretend that the poor of the 1990s are still holding up their heads amidst adversity, struggling heroicly with a smile and a word of encouragement for their neighbours – a temptation, in other words, to tell pretty lies about the poor, for fear that the truth is too damaging to their reputation. Of course, there are people who live on hellish estates who manage somehow to keep their lives in shape, but Worsthorne is right, and the reality is now far too bad to permit well-meaning pretence. Those communities live under immense pressure, and it is for that reason that significant numbers of those who live there have been shoveled into crime and prostitution and drugs and alcoholism and child abuse, into a life of ruthless self-interest. How else do you survive?
If you are arrested, you grass your friend. If someone leaves their giro lying around, you nick it. Not everyone does. But why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t 12-year-old boys and girls go out and sell their bodies to strangers in every city in this country? Why wouldn’t gangs of adolescent burglars target houses with wheelchair ramps, because they know the inhabitants are too infirm to resist? Why wouldn’t you sell smack and speed and crack cocaine to your friends? Why wouldn’t you pimp your girlfriend? It’s ghetto logic. If you resist it, and if you are really lucky, you might survive, but much more likely, you’ll go under. It’s not that the people on those estates are bad but profoundly that they live in conditions which are bad.
So what has changed? At its simplest the poor are buried under layers of aggravation. The first layer is the historically familiar one: they suffer material hardship. During the 1980s, they were forced out of work and their benefits were cut, over and over again; those who clung on to unskilled or part-time work saw legal safety nets removed so that their low pay fell even lower. But that is traditional poverty. The other layers under which they are being crushed are new.
The most damaging of these is the war against drugs, which is inflicting enormous harm on the very people it pretended to be protecting. It has become almost heretic to say this, but the reality is that our probited drugs are nowhere near as dangerous as the blackmarket on which they circulate. There is one group of people who do say this – the police officers who have been dumped with fighting the war. Unfortunately, almost without exception, they will say this only in private. The war is a failure. Worse than that, it is actively destructive. It forces users to become dealers in search of funds, thus ensuring that drug abuse has spread on an epidemic scale. For the same reason, it forces users into crime and prostitution, thus ensuring that they become criminal, that they lose their access to potential jobs and also their self-respect. It allows dealers to cut their drugs with bath scourer or chalk dust or talcum powder, regardless of the damage done to those who snort or shoot the result; it encourages users to share needles, spreading hepatitis and AIDS. In this way, the blackmarket has caused far more death and serious illness than the demonised drugs themselves.
After more than a decade of this, the key point now is not so much the narcotic effect of the drugs blackmarket, but its economic importance. If you are a 16-year-old school-leaver on one of those estates with no qualifications and no hope of a decent job and if you want life to provide you with the income and the status and stimulus which other adolescents will find in college and career, there is one obvious way forward. You see the 12-year-olds on their mountain bikes, racing round the estate with wraps of crack cocaine tucked under their upper lips, taking home several hundred pounds in cash at the end of the week; you see the 16-year-olds in their high performance cars, splashing cash in the clubs; you see the big guys, with their Rolexes and their detached houses, and you look up to them with envy and respect. So, you get on your bike and start dealing and you slip into a vortex of criminality and violence.
The declaration of the war against drugs has been the most serious social policy error since the war. This alone would divide poverty in the 1990s from that of the 1930s, explaining much of the depravity and collapse of which Worsthorne and his ilk complain. But there are more layers.
Consider, for example, what has happened to the classic escape route offered to the poor by the welfare state – education. Their schools, like all state schools, have been damaged by the withdrawal of funding, but, in addition, the most needy of these children are afflicted with a second problem. In alarming numbers, they are being excluded from the very institutions which might have rescued them. This is the direct result of league-tabling. Schools literally cannot afford to take in the most delinquent and difficult children. If they do so, those children will perform badly in their SATS tests and, if they are sufficiently disruptive, they may even damage the performance of others. So the school will slip down the league table; fewer parents will choose the school; and if fewer children enrol, the school will lose funding. Ask social workers how they get on nowadays when they call head teachers to plead for a place for difficult children on their books. The doors to the escape route are shut.
Worsthorne asks why these communities have collapsed. Undeniably, they have. For sure, there are still residents groups and community leaders bravely struggling to hold things together but they are trying to turn a tidal wave with a teaspoon. It is not just that neighbours may no longer help each other; frequently, they do not even know each other. It is not just that the physical fabric of the estates is collapsing into a mess of brambles and broken windows; there is effectively no-one there any more to reverse the decline. And the central reason for this collapse is the privatisation of public housing, a further layer of trouble.
It may well be that some families prospered by being able to buy and then to sell their council homes. It may be that some who bought and stayed have invested more care and attention than any local authority ever did. Nevertheless, the overwhelming side-effect of the privatisation has been to destroy the communities that once helped to support those who lived there. The old stability has gone and with it, the familiar faces and the bonds between them. More than that, they have been replaced by absentee landlords who have only the slightest interest in the physical condition of the houses and in the community around them. They rent them out on short-term lets to a shifting population of students and strangers who come and go with little more chance of forming relationships with those around them than passengers taking seats on a train.
There are other, thinner layers which add their weight. The care-in-the-community programme has dumped vulnerable and sometimes disruptive patients into the cheap housing on these estates, sometimes to sink without trace into a pit of loneliness, sometimes to enrage their neighbours with the symptoms of their illness. There is a cluster of debilitating problems caused by cuts in public services – buses which no longer run, libraries which no longer open, clubs and youth clubs which have folded. A whole layer of social supervision has disintegrated – the toilet attendant, the park keeper, the caretaker, the railway porter, the bus conductor – inviting trouble.
The point of all this is that poverty is not just about being short of money. Take material hardship, combine it with the blackmarket in drugs, close the door on education, kill off the community, add a dozen different other aggravations and you end up with a recipe for deep damage – physical, emotional, social, even spiritual damage. When the government looks at the notorious single mother and thinks that the answer is to offer her a job and to threaten her benefit, it ignores the obstacle course of other problems that lies in her path. She may be clinically depressed, simply unable to find the emotional will to cope and/or she may be a heroin addict and/or she has no one to look after her child who is probably asthmatic and/or she may be terrified to leave her house because she knows it will be burgled (some of the estate gangs specialise in ‘total burglaries’ where they take everything, even the carpets and the hotwater tank) and/or she is scared of being assaulted by some neighbour she fell out with and/or she has unpaid fines and she knows the courts will take whatever extra she earns and/or, and/or. Take the 18-year-old boy who is told by Gordon Brown that he will lose his welfare if he does not accept the dead-end work he is offered. Why should he play that game when there is a crack cocaine supermarket offering ready, steady career prospects on his doorstep? Take any of those men, women or children who have become so alienated and angry and self-destructive and bad that they may not want to behave – they may not be able to behave – in a rational, self-interested way. It does not matter how much you manipulate benefits or re-write regulations, it’s like curing cancer with elastoplast. The damage is deep, much more complicated than it appears at first sight, much more difficult to reverse.
When Peregrine Worsthorne tried to answer his question about the character of the new poverty, he turned to the decline of religion. But that’s not it. This is pure politics. Every single layer of this problem is formed entirely by a central government policy which was established by the Conservatives and which now sits at the heart of one of the great spending departments of Whitehall. None of this is natural (the next time someone leans back in their arm chair and tells you that the poor are always with us, simply punch them). The material hardship which forms the first layer of this poverty was created by government policy, by the Treasury’s pursuit of low public spending in the cause of lower taxes, and by the decision to attack inflation at the expense of employment. Those policies remain. The war against drugs still sits at the heart of Home Office policy just as league tables and the abolition of public housing and care-in-the-community still sit at the hearts of their respective departments. The real struggle against poverty is a political struggle to persuade the government to jettison the destructive policies which it inherited and which wove this complicated tapestry of damage.
And that is where this government is stuck with its attack on the most important domestic issue in this country – gazing out into the distance at a situation that appears to be so simple while beneath its nose, the core policies of its own ministers are actively, continuously generating the very disaster it wants to tackle.
Nick Davies is the author of Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain, published in paperback by Vintage.
