Distant Voices (5 page)

I have never been made homeless. To have nowhere to go, perhaps for the rest of my life, to face every day the uncertainty of the night and fear of the elements, is almost unimaginable. I say ‘almost', because in writing about the homeless I have gleaned something of their powerlessness once they are snared in what used to be known as the ‘welfare state'. This was true before Thatcher.

The difference these days is that there are no ‘typical' homeless any more. They are also from the middle classes and the new software classes. They are both old and young – an estimated 35,000 children are homeless in London
alone. My friend is typical in that he bears the familiar scars of homelessness: such as a furtiveness that gives the impression of a person being followed; a sporadic, shallow joviality that fails to mask his anxiety; and a deferential way that does not necessarily reflect his true self. The latter, because it is out of character, is occasionally overtaken by melodramatic declarations of independence. When he told me he had to go to hospital one day for a stomach operation and I offered to take him, he said, ‘No! I can walk! Of course I can!' And he did.

I didn't know who or what he was until recently. It seemed an intrusion to ask. My place in his life was simply as a source of a few quid from time to time. Then one day he was telling me about a television programme about Asia he had seen, and it was clear he had been there in the Army. And that led to a statement of pride about what he had done with his life on leaving the Army. He had worked in a garage, training apprentice mechanics, until this was thwarted by a string of personal tragedies: a divorce and finally his ‘redundancy': that wonderful expression of the Enterprise Society. He was then too old to start again; and he was taking to drink.

He has turned up with cuts and bruises, and blood caked on his cheek. Once, when I said I would go and call a doctor, I returned to the door to find him gone. On the common and in the streets, he is prey to thugs and to the police. He has little of the protection the rest of us assume as a right, provided by a civilised society. The defences that have been built up for the likes of him since the great Depression of sixty years ago continue to be dismantled with platitudes that are spoken, unchallenged, on the news almost every night.

Recently it was National Housing Week. The junior housing minister, Tim Yeo, said the government's ‘rough sleepers initiative', which was launched during the freezing conditions of last winter, had halved the numbers of homeless sleeping out in London.

Anyone driving through London's West End knows this to
be untrue. The homeless in the capital have become a tourist curiosity. Europeans are incredulous at having to step over so many human bundles on the pavement, in the Underground, on the steps of galleries and museums. Eavesdrop on a French tour guide describing the sights in the shopfronts of the Strand. ‘They were hosed away,' she says, ‘but they have come back.'

With the maximum publicity, the government allocated £300 million for ‘rough sleepers'. As the London Housing Unit has pointed out, this has been wiped out by the £138 million in cuts in long-term housing investment by councils and by the abolition of £100 million-worth of special allowances for London boroughs.
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The minister, Tim Yeo, said: ‘You will see a similar priority given to housing as to education and health between now and the general election.'
²
In the circumstances this had to be irony; but it was not.

June 14, 1991

I SOMETIMES DELIVER
a friend of my small daughter to her grandmother's home on a housing estate in south London. It is not the worst of the estates put up in the early 1960s, yet it takes just a dozen steps to cross into another world, inhabited by a nation long declared expendable, if not invisible.

The child in my brief care is terribly thin; and when the door opens, the nodding faces display the same ghostly pallor. The older faces are skeined grey: the indelible mark of white poverty. The view from their door is of asphalt and cracked concrete, broken glass and broken swings, crisp bags and dogshit; and a rusting banger on which teenage boys gather in their cheap jeans and trainers. The pent-up energy of these boys is like a presence; to an old person or a young child it must be menacing. I have watched them expend some of it by riding a bike in slalom course through the glass and dogshit, back and forth, back and forth.

Whenever I ask them what they ‘do', their reaction is incredulity. One of them laughs. They do nothing of course! Even those still at school do nothing; and leaving school will mean more nothing. That, they seem to say, is what they are for. They are the literal opposite of nihilists; for it is
they
who have been rejected.

It is likely they knew about this state of nothingness as far back as the age of seven. That is when the ego expands and children get a pretty good idea of where they are heading, especially those in a class-based society. Modernised poverty adds another dimension. There is the beginning of conflict
between popular, illusory expectations and the inability of many young people to grasp that these are illusions and not for them. By the time they reach their teens, they will be blamed for not living up to inspirational images that are almost all of wealth and acquisition. The resulting frustration will produce violence, most of it of no direct threat to others; it is inward violence manifest in failure at school, the disintegration of relationships, and in general ill-health.

In 1989, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health reported that the death rates for British men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five had risen every year since 1985. This was unprecedented.
³
In the same year, the results of a study by one of the leading authorities on poverty, Professor Peter Townsend, shocked even its author. The study showed that in the five poorest wards of Manchester there were 1,446 more deaths every year than the national average; and that the process begins in the cradle. Whereas in the affluent parts of Manchester only 3 per cent of babies were born underweight, in the poor estates the figure was 14 per cent. ‘I find the severity of the findings somewhat awesome,' Professor Townsend said. ‘I've been taken aback by the extent of hardship in a concentrated form in our inner cities.'
⁴

This means that most of the violence in the other nation is a quiet destroyer. ‘Poverty kills,' says Peter Townsend, ‘that is not a political or a social comment, but a scientific fact.'
⁵
Heart disease, cancer, mental illness, not petrol bombs, kill and maim; and in recent years the violent assault on the spirit of the young has been unrelenting. A quarter of Europe's poor now live in Britain. One in five of the very young now live in poverty.

In estates all over the country youth unemployment is more than 80 per cent. During the Thatcher decade economic inequality rose more sharply than at any time since modern records were kept: a fact that alone puts paid to her ridiculous posturing about ‘democracy' and ‘choice'.
⁶
The decimation of industry, schools, clinics and public services, the
extinction of a national housing programme, have been violent acts of historic proportions.

A new poverty has arisen in the space of less than two decades, as British manufacturing has abandoned more than two-thirds of its workforce. Men with absolute skills have been marooned. Women and the unskilled are employed in ‘service industries' for wages that have no minimum. Working conditions, including safety provisions, have deteriorated, as the unions are routed and almost every net is taken away. For the working-class young, there is no longer the prospect of apprenticeship and the pride that went with it; at best they must accept training schemes that are fraudulent. In the meantime, the social landscape has changed.

The solidarity that once held working people together and helped them mobilise and build their organisations has been undermined by the isolation of one-parent life on the estates, of Brave New Britain, now secret, obsolescent Britain. And who speaks for these people? Labour says it does, but the new poor don't believe them, or anyone, any more. When Neil Kinnock was asked for his response to the riot at Meadow Well estate in North Shields – where almost all the young people are jobless and all the children at the local primary school are on clothing grants – he said there was ‘absolutely no excuse' for it.
⁷

Roy Hattersley did refer briefly to unemployment. Unless I missed something, the distinct impression was that Labour was most concerned that Murdoch's and Maxwell's yob-hunters were watching them. The
Daily Mirror
attacked the Bishop of Newcastle, Alec Graham, for saying: ‘There comes a time when the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness overcomes people and they act in a wild way.'
⁸
The Bishop, said the
Mirror
, was talking ‘twaddle through his episcopal hat'. It says much about the melancholy state of British politics that such an understatement of the obvious is routinely belittled. So narrow is the political debate now, so collaborative or cynical or cowed are those who claim to oppose the true enemies of the people, that a rare eruption
of violence in the streets has the barkers of authority in full panic.

As for the liberal establishment, which a dozen years ago was still reputed to be applying the principles of R. H. Tawney, there is now silence, broken by the drawing-room twitter of people of letters and the apologia of the old middle-aged on sterile television programmes or in the ‘quality' press. Thatcher's children, the old young men, have seen them off.

A dozen years ago there would have been efforts by the caring services to negotiate short-term solutions in places of poverty like Meadow Well, and sustained attempts to understand the reasons why; to explain the past and the nature of the betrayal of at least two post-war generations; and the smashing of so much of the community life that was this country's strength.

In the 1970s, I walked along Peel Street and Gladstone Terrace that overlooked the green vales of County Durham. The view from the houses with teefall roofs was of Friesian dairy cows and Hereford crosses and of hawthorn bramble and wild rose that smothered the cuttings and embankments of disused railway lines. These were village streets with pubs and clubs, pigeon crees and football teams and the warmth of the inhabitants for each other. They became known as ‘D villages' and, along with so many industrial communities on the edge of the countryside, they were smashed: no, ‘phased out' was the term insisted upon at the time.

The people were ‘phased' into estates, high- and low-rise, with Western Ways and Central Avenues and without pubs and clubs and football teams. The restoration of their old fine terraces and the inception of a few bus routes would have saved these communities. Instead, they were dumped – the word is precise – in jerry-built boxes whose window frames had already burst free and where damp had already risen and the rats arrived by the time the first key had turned in the door. To isolated women and the young, they were sort of concentration camps. Getting a youth club, staffed by experts who gave a damn, was a Herculean achievement. I recall that in the desolate River Streets area of Birkenhead
the campaign for the funding of a youth and community hall ran for years.

These struggles again come to mind with the news that youth services in Newcastle upon Tyne are to be cut by £8 million. Youth clubs are to be closed where there is nothing else. This, says Newcastle council leader Jeremy Beecham, is ‘a bitter paradox' that can ‘only further weaken a social fabric already strained by years of unemployment, poverty and absence of hope'.

There was no paradox when Thatcher and her ideologues invented the ‘two thirds society', in which a few got very rich and many did all right on credit and a large minority were dispossessed in the American way. That is, the poor were declared an ‘underclass' to be contained on ghetto-estates and forgotten about or blamed, whichever was politically appropriate.

Shortly after Thatcher won a second term in 1983 (when her fortunes soared from a 17 per cent popularity rating due to her victory over General Galtieri) a senior Department of Education official warned in a secret report that legislative powers might be necessary to ‘rationalise' the schools' curricula. ‘We are in a period of considerable social change,' he wrote. ‘There may be social unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths . . . but if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious conflict.
People must be educated once more to know their place
.'
⁹

Complementing this was propaganda that presented the working-class young as ‘spongers'. Although this was false, legislation was passed to prevent the ‘work-shy' who left home from claiming state benefits. They were to ‘return to their families' and make ‘genuine efforts to look for employment'. Following years of campaigning by Shelter and other organisations, the government finally commissioned research last year. MORI interviewed 551 young people with no income who had applied for severe hardship payments. The report showed that more than 70 per cent had tried Youth Training, 66 per cent had worked previously and 80 per cent visited their careers offices. MORI also found that 65 per
cent of young people who had ‘left home' had been thrown out. Almost a quarter had been physically or sexually abused by a member of their family or by staff at a children's home.
¹⁰

The betrayal of the young began with both Tory and Labour governments; but of course Thatcher went much further. For all its pretensions to be a modern European state, Britain is unique in making changes to its social benefits and tax system that have taken most from the poor and given most to the rich. During the Thatcher decade, the bottom half of the population lost £4,800 million in tax and benefits to the top 5 per cent. A single pensioner, whose pension in 1991 is £52 a week, is getting £14 a week less in real terms than he or she would have received in 1979. No other country in the European Community has seen such a large increase in the number of people who are in poverty.
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