When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (16 page)

By the late 1980s, this avidly reported violence had convinced politicians, commentators and the public that society had undergone a moral sea-change. The basic social contract, whereby citizens enjoy certain rights – including health care, decent education and housing, and a job – in return for which they observe the rule of law, was breaking down. As a consequence, an underclass was evolving – football hooligans, muggers, inner-city rioters – somewhat more frightening than their Dickensian forebears because they were mobile and all too visible. The victims of poor schooling, poor upbringing, economic blight (you take your pick of explanations according to your prejudices) were beyond the pale, a danger to be feared at the best of times and contained at the worst.

The week in which I returned to Britain, the worst occurred. The country was suddenly pitched into a series of conflagrations, sparked by some maladroit policing, which illustrated just how stark the divide had become between these young people and the rest of society. Serious rioting broke out in several inner-city areas – Handsworth in Birmingham, Brixton in south London, and the Broadwater Farm estate in north London, where a policeman was hacked to death by a mob. Petrol bombs were thrown at the police, and – for the first time in a civil disturbance – shots were fired. Two Asians were burned to death in a Birmingham Post Office. Coming only a few months after the Heysel Stadium carnage, these riots appeared to signal the disintegration of urban society. The alien hordes – football hooligans and rioters – were at the door. A few streets away from gentrified terraces, there was a world where the Queen's writ ran but fitfully. The disorders buried any misconceived notions that the suppressed anger and bleak despair of Britain's inner cities had somehow melted away in the four years since the petrol bombers and looters had last taken to the streets.

But to me, returning home, what was almost as terrifying as the glimpse of mayhem round the corner were the knee-jerk reactions of national and local political leaders. Each spoke sad volumes about how polarized Britain had become after six years of inner-city recession and an essentially uncaring national government. The right picked on the consequences of permissive child-raising by parents who had been brought up in the free-wheeling sixties; while the left concentrated on economic devastation wrought by Thatcherism on already deprived communities. Neither side in the polarized political environment of Britain was prepared to concede that there was some justice on the other side: the riots became just another opportunity for political abuse.

Norman Tebbit blamed them on ‘wickedness', a cosy notion that absolved the government from doing much more than seeking to lock up the offenders. Bernie Grant, the black leader of Haringey Council and now a Labour MP, whose leadership then consisted of underscoring the prejudices of the most alienated of his constituents, suggested, ‘Maybe it was a policeman who killed another policeman.' What was chilling and salutary about these two reactions was that both speakers were populist figures articulating the gut reactions of many Britons. Another of our post-war assumptions was finally buried – the hope and expectation that black Britons, the children and grandchildren of the motivated, hard-working and God-fearing West Indians, and the white children of what had been the slums would become fully integrated citizens sharing the opportunities of their fellow Britons. Here was another cleavage – and perhaps the starkest of all. The most alienated and locked-out section of British society – the black and white urban poor – lived just a short bus ride away from Westminster, Whitehall and the City of London: from the top of the Gloucester Grove estate, next to the North Peckham estate and just south of the Old Kent Road, one can see both the Houses of Parliament and the new tower blocks in the City. How to contain ‘yobbism' had become the political question of the hour: the week in which I first visited North Peckham, Scotland Yard took delivery of twelve armoured vehicles. A doctor who saw something of senior police officers in between stitching victims of stabbings said: ‘The police are predicting problems with North Peckham, and are all tooled up – water cannon, rubber bullets, CS gas, the lot.'

It is the middle classes who install burglar alarms, write letters to the newspapers and attend Conservative Party conferences to demand harsher sentences, but the real victims of a breakdown in law and order are the poor, cowering like Mrs Smith behind their flimsy front doors, fearful of going out, fearful of staying home, living in a medieval world where might makes right, and where the police are often of little more avail than a paper umbrella in a typhoon. June Mortimer, a motherly Yorkshire woman who runs the Southwark Victim Support Scheme, had just lost four of her volunteers. She said: ‘They couldn't cope, they found they were powerless to help. What the victims needed was money, the one thing they couldn't give. The victims live in siege conditions. Yet if they go out, their homes might be burgled and they might be attacked. It is a fearful state of affairs. The quality of their lives is nil, there is nothing left to be burgled.' Many of these people are on or below the poverty line already. Insurance is either unobtainable or so expensive as to be out of reach. One woman on the North Peckham estate, whose home had been burgled, told me she had been treated by the insurance assessor as if she herself were the criminal. He challenged all her claims, even suggesting, when she had receipts with her own name and address on them, she might somehow have forged or borrowed them. In the end the company paid half her claim, and told her they would double her future premium. She now takes her chance and has four locks on the front door.

You won't find ‘Broadwater Farm', ‘North Peckham', or ‘Gloucester Grove' in the index of the A-Z, nor the names of the walkways on which the residents live. Even if you drive past, unless you know what you're looking for, you almost certainly will not realize that populations the size of small towns are shut away behind walls that look like the outside of multi-storey car parks. Camden, North Peckham and Gloucester Grove lie a half mile or so from Peckham Rye station, where even at 9.00 a.m. human derelicts had taken up their positions for the day on public benches. ‘
KICK AFRICANS OUT OF BRITAIN
' was neatly printed in large letters on a Barclays Bank hoarding; an emaciated, elderly blind man in a filthy black mac tapped his lonely way across the rutted pavement and past the black rubbish bags; ‘Tories Out' said a hopeful poster, and ‘Strike Now Against YTS' said another, though how the unemployed can ‘strike' was not explained. Old bangers were lined up in a car lot – nothing over £800. Outside North Peckham estate someone was trying to sell an ‘S-Reg' Ford Escort: ‘Good Runner – £12.0' read the scribbled sign. A man on a community programme scheme was painting a fence, his radio blaring out ‘Lazing on a sunny afternoon … in the summer time, in the summer time, in the summer time …' as if to mock the drab surroundings and the grey, chill April day. On a wall nearby there was an incongruous touch: someone had retrieved from an earlier building and remounted two stone tablets, which read: ‘To the lasting honour of those who fell in the Great War.' Litter lay around the bottom of the steps to the ‘vicarage': squashed beer and coke cans, a Lucozade bottle, Kit-Kat wrappers, paper plates.

A notice on the vicarage door, two flights up on a walkway especially notorious for drug-users, told callers to ring the bell – but the bell had been ripped out, leaving a small blackened hole, and the glass replaced with shatterproof Perspex. The reinforced glass on the vicar's living-room balcony had been shattered by catapults and airgun pellets. ‘You can sit by the window,' laughed the Revd Graham Derriman, six years into a ten-year stint, which, he said, was undermining his health. ‘A leg infection blows up out of the blue and immobilizes me. I assume it is the stress.' His home, he said, was one of only three non-council properties in his parish of eight thousand souls. He had come, he said, because he had not found a reason to say ‘No', but, had he known then what he came to know later, he might have been ‘too frightened'. It helped that he was single; he could not imagine a married vicar bringing up children on North Peckham estate. He had set himself the task of persuading people to settle down and make something of the estate – a necessary, if possibly unachievable, objective. ‘It may be wishful thinking, but I want to get people to change their attitudes. This estate can be all right if we can stabilize it,' he said. He had been burgled twice himself, and people he had trusted had stolen from him when they visited. Someone had even taken the bell out of his alarm. In the days when there had been milk deliveries, his milk had been pinched more often than not before he could bring it in: he had always meant to lie in wait to see who did it, but never got round to the effort.

He did not, however, feel frightened or intimidated on the walkways, asserting his right to tread the ‘streets' of his parish and the Queen's ‘highway', though he realized that if he ever were ‘bashed on the head' he might change his attitude. He was overwhelmed, like Mrs Mortimer of the Southwark Victim Support Scheme, with the crippling poverty that lapped round him. The night before, a hungry man had called at his door for food; a young father had come pleading for shoes for a child, such a requirement being a ‘disaster' for some families; for many in his congregation – there had been nearly seventy people in church on the previous Sunday, most of whom were black – every penny counted. They could never enjoy the ‘luxury' of a 40p bunch of flowers, never bought new clothes, making do with jumble sales and Oxfam shops. ‘They do not have the elemental freedom to choose clothes to suit their personality or mood. It's quite a crippling thing,' he said. Some parishioners would not let him penetrate past their kitchens, because they were ashamed of the shabby state of their homes. Many were not very good at coping anyway – North Peckham is near the Maudsley psychiatric hospital, and houses a fair number of discharged patients. A breakdown is one way of ensuring that someone else will cope with unmanageable problems. Mr Derriman had recently taken a group on an outing to the seaside. It had been a drizzling, grey day, and the trip mildly depressing. Suddenly one old woman had burst out: ‘Oh, isn't it lovely?' ‘Isn't what lovely?' asked Mr Derriman in some perplexity. ‘To see the grass,' she replied. She had not been out of London for two years, and spent most of her life staring at the drab, yellow-brick wall opposite her kitchen window.

The violence and fear of violence are ever-present in North Peckham like Muzak in a department store. Mr Derriman had got to know some of his congregation at first by shouting through letterboxes to people too frightened to open their doors. He was sure that, if you removed all the existing tenants and replaced them with stable families, the newcomers would also suffer the same social problems within a few years – victims of the architecture of the estates, where privacy is at a premium and noise is endemic, and where there is nothing for young people to do except loiter on walkways and paint graffiti on walls. ‘Life is just empty of everything; there is no pattern to it; there is nothing to do, no point to anything. There is lethargy and apathy. My heart bleeds for them,' said Mr Derriman. Crime, he suggested, was almost inevitable in this environment. ‘Breaking in,' he said, ‘is the kind of work that's seen to be viable. A youngster who might get forty or fifty pounds for a legitimate week's work can pick up £200 in a night.' He believed the young criminals had little sense of guilt, and justified their crimes by pointing to upper-class criminality involving millions of pounds, like the Guinness affair and MPs making multiple applications for privatized shares – then much in the news. ‘Everyone's out for themselves, that's the feeling. Some lads tell you they put a limit on mugging, but there's nothing wrong in stealing from shops because
they
can afford it,' he said. One of the few supermarkets on North Peckham had recently been attacked and burned out by a gang who complained that its prices were exorbitant. The fish'n'chip shop next door had been closed by its proprietor, an ex-policeman, because he was tired of being robbed, usually by black teenagers. Many young people were totally unconcerned about the consequences of their criminal deeds. One young woman who stole to feed her drug habit asked Mr Derriman to lend her £250 for bail. ‘Oh well,' she said when he refused, ‘it was worth a try.' The sum was imposed because she had failed to attend court when her case was first called – she had been in Tenerife at the time.

Black people in such areas as North Peckham were, said Mr Derriman, denied real power because those in authority were frightened by what they might do with it – a local group had, for example, been refused the freehold of a building they wanted as a resource centre. One way of compensating was to seek power in other ways. ‘Frightening people and creating fear of riots is one of those powers,' he said. The kids went around telling white people that there had to be a revolution, knowing full well the effect they created. One beefy, white lorry driver, with an ex-boxer's broken nose, was so terrified of black youths on the walkways that he made long detours to avoid them. A young man who had come from Cambridge to work at the adventure playground quit after six months because he could not take the pressure of being surrounded by people by whom he felt constantly threatened. In these circumstances there was virtually no cooperation with the police in detecting or stopping crime. People see cars and flats being broken into, and do nothing because they are frightened of reprisals. Crime, therefore, flourishes unhampered. A black youth worker told me that street thieves will now often simply stroll away after robbing a victim: chasing and apprehending muggers and burglars in North Peckham is virtually impossible. In six years Mr Derriman had come across only one case of someone acting the good citizen to promote law and order: a woman had called him anonymously to report children lighting fires in the playground. Children start fires, he said, because it gives them a sense of power to see the fire brigade called out.