The Bleeding Heart Show

I haven’t found the time to sit down and watch Ministry of Food yet, so I have no idea whether I’d be repulsed by Jamie Oliver’s supposed ‘patronising’ of the working classes or impressed by his idealism. I do agree with this comment that for all the cynicism about a wealthy celeb ’slumming it with the chavs’, his intentions seem good and his approach - however meddlesome, intrusive & embarrassing it might be for the show’s subjects - seems considerably more effective than the hand-wringing warnings of health ministers. On the question of whether it’s freak-show TV, I think it’s wise to consider someone’s past record, and on that basis I think Oliver deserves a pass: his Fifteen restaurant chain, which sprang from a show where he hired 15 kids from deprived backgrounds and taught them how to work in hospitality, was an impressive achievement. Very few people in his industries have made a fortune for themselves whilst trying to persue some measure of positive social change, and for that he deserves credit.

I’m writing solely from favourable reviews here, but the show’s concept appears to be as much of a social documentary as ‘Breadline Britain’ ever was, and by occasionally panning away from the core focus on unhealthy diets, you’re made aware of the kinds of connected issues about education & deprivation that simply don’t get the kind of serious discussion they deserve. Going even further, it also raises more esoteric issues about the role of the state in tackling obesity, the future of the NHS, and whether the progressive left has the answers for any of the above.

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We might not be having much success in making poverty history, but we can, at least, make sure no one has to read about it. That’s the conclusion of this Rowntree Foundation report that’s been generating a fair amount of chatter in recent days. To cut a long story short, the report finds that the media’s coverage of poverty in Britain leaves a lot to be desired, both in the amount of coverage it’s given and in the form this coverage takes. The report argues that if it’s even mentioned at all, the issue is covered casually, often as a way of talking about broader issues like crime, the economy and politics. ‘Real life’ depictions of poverty are almost always absent, and the poor are often represented in an unsympathetic light.

The report concludes that the media can and must do more to give poverty the high profile it deserves, and they’ve even produced a ‘practical guide’ of advice for journalists who end up being forced to write about it. It’s all very noble, well-intentioned & agreeable, of course, but I really don’t see how it’s going to make a blind bit of difference. As Peter Wilby notes, the unfortunate bottom line is that poverty isn’t going to sell newspapers and it’s not going to make great TV. Every editorial decision is also a business decision and it doesn’t make too much sense in the current climate to produce portrayals of deprivation at a time when most of the country is also suffering from hardship. Editors are beholden to their readers & their owners, not reports from well-meaning pressure groups.

However, it’s also true that the media is dependent on events, and uses them as a means of discussing broader social issues. The riots in Brixton & Toxteth provided the opportunity to highlight the deprivation in those communities, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence became a chance to discuss the problem of racism. So when Shannon Matthews was assumed to have been kidnapped and the nation’s media arrived, en masse, to the economically unhappy community of Dewsbury Moor, why wasn’t there more serious focus on the poverty kids like Shannon were growing up in, rather than the snobbish seething over her mother’s personal life?

There’s isn’t one sole, simple answer, but I think there might be some truth in Tom Clarke’s suggestion that social class, and the economic & cultural disparity between those who produce the media and those who receive it, may well be a contributing factor. If this is true, then we might assume that the media is unconsciously (and therefore uncritically) reflecting the increasing economic inequalities in Britain. If so, then perhaps it might be time to redirect a few foreign correspondents to report from our council estates.

So you know this plan to threaten a school with closure if it fails to meet its targets? I was wondering; any chance we can apply it to governments, too?

For those who still care about that nebulous concept called social justice, it’s been a pretty wretched week: health inequalities are becoming sharper, the number of children in poverty has increased by 100,000 and the number of poor pensioners by three times that amount.

Since the poverty rate also increased last year, we can no longer view it as an aberration, but as the beginnings of worrying trend. Given the increases in food and fuel prices and the unlikelihood that Darling’s 10p tax ‘compensation package’ will reimburse everyone who lost out, it’s likely to rise next year as well. Thanks to the financial straightjacket Brown has imposed on his government, we face the very real prospect that by 2010 - the target Blair set to halve child poverty - the figure will continue to creep back towards pre-Labour levels.

At this point, it’s difficult to know to respond without reaching for clichés: sure, we can say Labour’s been subservient to big business & the super-rich, too obsessed with their middle class marginals to bother with sane social policy and so petrified of tongue-lashings from the Tory press that they’re happy to adopt any authoritarian measure that’ll keep them quiet. We can say all of this, but it won’t really get us anywhere.

Instead, we need to look at Brown’s actions since becoming PM and try to deduce whether his government has either the ability or the resolve to correct its mistakes and pursue the new ideas needed to close the gap between rich and poor. The evidence is… well, what do you expect?!

Where to start? We’ve seen him brutishly declare British Jobs For British Workers, shamelessly announce troop withdrawals during the Tory conference, sign the Lisbon treaty when he thought no one would be watching, give inheritance tax away, abolish the 10p tax band to pay for a middle class tax cut and reclassify cannabis despite there being no evidence it’s required.

But perhaps most reflective of Brown’s approach to politics can be seen in the awful, unnecessary, and ghastly authoritarianism displayed in passing 42 days detention. As has been noted elsewhere, there have been no coherent arguments about why the bill is required now, nor why 28 days was so dangerously insufficient; there have been a paltry number of cases that’ve even gone close to original limit and a Home Office Minister suggested the new power might never even be used - arguing, laughably, that it will just be a benign safeguard in case counter-terrorism officers encounter a villain who could evade even Jack Bauer.

No, the prime motivation behind this bill, just like so many other actions he’s taken as Prime Minister, is a craven brand of politics. Faced with worse polls ratings than Michael Foot, Brown’s spent weeks scrabbling around for an issue with which to begin his ‘comeback’, and since the opinion polls are in favour and both the Tories and Liberals are opposed, he gets to ‘fight courageously’ for Britain’s security against the ‘hug-a-terrorist’ brigade who bleat about human rights.

Yeats once wrote “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” This isn’t always true. In fact, when looking at Brown I’d argue the worst all lack conviction. Since becoming Prime Minister, Brown’s modus operandi has been calculation and triangulation, surrendering key policies for short-term gain & scoring cheap points on trivial issues. Above all, his Premiership has been defined not by a desire to govern well but by a desire to win. He has been successful in neither.

You don’t go into government to beat the Conservatives; you go into government to help those who most need it. And when your desire to beat the Tories and save your own skin prevents you from helping those your party represents, then you really must question whether you’re fit to lead Labour into next week, let alone the next election.

Change quickly, Gordon, or resign - there are millions still living in poverty and they just can’t afford you.

Photo by Flickr user davepattern (Creative Commons)

The reason I’m writing about ‘Cushygate‘ in two separate posts is that whilst there’s always fun to be had at the expense of the right’s overheated hysteria, our criminal justice system seems so broken, so socially-destructive and so utterly unfit for purpose that we need all the serious words we can muster. But if seriousness was the intention of Glyn Travis as he took to the airwaves on Talk Sport & Radio 4’s Today programme, he failed miserably, merely succeeding in adding fuel to the right’s fire about the Prison Scum who suck on the soft teat of the taxpayer.

Since he made no direct reference to the dozens of more desperate ailments afflicting the prison service, what you’ll find at the core of Travis’ argument is a non-too-subtle demand for more staff, greater resources and higher wages. These are all demands I have sympathy for, which makes it so frustrating that he insists the main problem is those unemployed, undereducated, mentally ill and addiction-addled inmates in its care somehow have it too easy - as if any of them have ever had anything easy.

Had he encountered better-prepared interviewers, they might have asked him whether the recent damages awarded to inmates who suffered beatings and racial discrimination at the hands of his fellow prison officers was an example of the ‘cushy’ life they enjoyed. They might have asked whether last year’s 22,000 cases of self-harm was just because inmates were upset they couldn’t get Pay-per-View boxing on Sky. They might have asked why, if his workplace is such a Centre Parks that inmates never wish to leave, was the 2006 suicide rate 33 times higher than the rest of the country, and if the 92 people who killed themselves last year on his members’ watch only did so because they didn’t like the croissants that came with their breakfast in bed. Finally, they might have asked Glyn Travis why he thought it best to ignore these serious problems in favour of playing the Prison Scum card to an eager media. Sadly, we probably know the answer to the last question; it’s in his members’ interests.

So where do we go from here and how do we hope to grapple with the problems caused by decades of ‘get tough’ governing that’s seen the prison population rise to record levels? I’m sure there are countless approaches we can take, not all of them easy nor without their flaws, but we must surely get past the idea that simply locking offenders away is an effective long-term crime prevention strategy. As I wrote earlier this month:

As much as some of us might wish to lock all criminals up for life, the reality is that only the most violent, most dangerous offenders stay incarcerated for that long, and they are a tiny minority of the prison population. Like it or not, the rest of them will one day be released. And if they’ve been released without help finding accomodation or a new job, without help with whatever mental illnesses they may harbour, whatever drug or behavioural problems they may be battling, whatever skills or education they lack to find employment, they are much more likely to offend again.

Sure, stepping-up our efforts to rehabilitate offenders is a fairly standard liberal policy, but these words by criminologist & former prison governor David Wilson got me thinking about a way we could achieve that:

Prison has become the functioning alternative to the welfare state and, as such, the only institution in this country where, as a matter of right, you can get almost immediate access to a doctor, a dentist, a drugs counsellor, a teacher, advice about homelessness, help in applying for jobs, and where these rights are enforceable by the courts.

[...]

Quite simply, there are never going to be enough prison officers to control a jail through sheer weight of numbers, and every jail therefore runs with the consent of those who are being locked up. If prisoners withdraw that consent to be governed - as they did during the lead-up to the riots at HMP Strangeways - then our prison system comes to a grinding, crashing, juddering halt.

The tension apparent in this relationship between prisoner and prison officer - the inmate whose well-being is dependent on the care they receive and the prison officer whose job depends on the co-operation and good behaviour of the inmate - certainly indicates that prison could be a place where productive rehabilitation can be achieved.

If you’ve committed crimes against others then you’ve infringed upon the values of peace and freedom that exist amongst all liberal democracies, and if a court rules the crime to be serious enough to revoke your own freedom, you should serve the sentence given to you. But whilst you have a duty to yourself to make sure you never offend again, the state has a similar duty to those citizens who pay it money to enforce & uphold the law to make sure you never offend again.

To that end, yes, we need more prisons - lots more - but they should also be a fraction of the size of those we currently pay for. And if we had smaller prisons and more prison guards per inmate then maybe we’d reduce the amount of drug smuggling, stop a few suicides and attempts at self-harm. Then, who knows, perhaps if we staffed these smaller, more secure prisons with as many drug therapists, psychiatrists, fitness trainers and educators as there are security guards, there’d be an opportunity for those inside (who, let’s face it, are a bit of a captive audience) to overcome some of the root causes of them being banged-up in the first place.

That couldn’t be the end of the matter, of course; you’d still need to revamp the probation service to ensure that those being released could find both accommodation (for homeless inmates are far more likely to reoffend when released) and an occupation and none of this is an adequate substitute for investing in safer communities, better public housing and education in those areas that most need it.

As I said earlier, no approach is perfect, but there are alternatives to this country’s current Judge Dredd approach to crime that - if framed in the right way - could be sold to the waverers from the ‘hang ‘em & flog ‘em’ approach as being in the whole country’s self-interest.

Nobody goes to prison for a cushy life, but a lot of people end up in prison believing crime is the only way to get there. Prison might be able to provide proof to the contrary, but only if we work for it.

Photo by Flickr user vinduhl (Creative Commons)

I wish I had more time to write a more balanced blog post about this new report by the Reform thinktank on the relationship between work and welfare in economically deprived areas, but for now you’ll have to make do with two brief, insulted observations:

1. Describing their observations as being symptomatic of a “why bother economy” sounds nothing more than a dog-whistle to the right. It wrongly insinuates that the poor are simply lazy and that if only they were to turn off the daytime TV, get off their arses and put in a decent day’s work, all our problems will be solved. It won’t.
2. I can’t believe I’m still having to say this 50 years after Beveridge, but the thinking behind the welfare state is not and has never been about ‘paying people to be poor‘ and only the most brainless would insist that welfare can act as a tool of social mobility. It only takes a superficial reading of post-war politics to understand why the welfare state exists, but here’s a crude summary: it stops people from dying of poverty.

For what on the surface seems a serious and well-meaning effort to address problems, these are two ghastly errors in framing their argument.

Please Neil, my imaginary editor asks, do we really have to endure another post of worthier-than-thou sincerity concerning the Shannon Matthews saga? Wouldn’t you be happier indulging your Obama fetish, being mean to Guardian columnists or writing about obscure indie bands?

Of course I would; I haven’t been more depressed since starting this blog than the moment I began trudging through the pile of effluent that’s been written. It’s only when you focus on one case for a while that you become wise to how much sewerage and spite some people are able to store in their hearts for those they’ve never even met.

Still, our raging beast of a media waits for no blogger, and since a jury hasn’t returned a verdict and there won’t even be a trial until November, it’s time for our press’ finest minds to start savaging the Guilty-Until-Proven-Guilty Matthews’ for all they’re worth. Okay, in this case, we’re talking about Allison Pearson, so it’s less ‘raging beast’ and more ‘paper tiger’, but paper tigers can still sting. Or at least irritate.

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After septicisle posted a ‘mea culpa‘ admitting that his eloquent and passionate posts on the Shannon Matthews case might now look rather silly in the light of her mother’s arrest on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, I thought I should post an explanation of why I don’t think he needed to, and why I won’t be doing the same.

For those of us who cringed through the (right-wing) media’s coverage of Shannon’s disappearance, we saw much of it as symptomatic of a wider cultural disdain for the poor and a compulsion towards viewing their problems through the myopic looking-glass of moral degeneracy. If only these people would become upstanding citizens, learn to speak properly, stop sleeping around and taking drugs, maybe we wouldn’t have these problems, so the whole tiresome argument goes. They’ll trot out the same shabby straw men - the welfare state, comprehensive schools, a ’soft’ criminal justice system, liberals, Trots and hippies - as co-conspirators in this ’societal collapse’ and will then invariably conclude that a return to Victorian values and bare-knuckled Thatcherism is the only way to save ourselves from certain doom.

It’s the same cliched argument-by-numbers that commentators have been using for over a decade now - the Shannon Matthews case was just a perfect opportunity for likes of Melanie Phillips & Allison Pearson to reheat it.

Trouble is, in order to impose this argument on the Matthews case, they had to twist their representations so much that they became a character assassination on a poor, undereducated woman who everyone assumed was worried sick about her missing daughter (that she may have known where she was all along is irrelevant - everyone writing at the time assumed she was a missing person).

Because Karen had five kids by four fathers, she must be a loose-legged slut who sacrificed her kids’ livelihoods for the sake of a drunken shag. Any other explanations for her fractured family - maybe the fathers were too pathetic to stick around, maybe they were unsuitable parents, maybe she was the victim of domestic abuse - were completely ignored. For the conservative argument to work, she must be was responsible, she must be villified.

And not only was Karen Matthews villified, but so was her family and, by extension, working-class families in Dewsbury Moor and beyond. All as a front for the furthering of a political agenda. This was what appalled me most about the initial coverage of Shannon’s disappearance, and though some of the facts in my earlier posts may now be out-of-date, I certainly won’t be retracting the arguments contained therein.

Related posts:

• Finding Shannon Matthews - So Much For ‘Broken Britain’
• Shorter Melanie Phillips - Shannon Matthews had it coming

In the summer before I went to university, I took a job in a newsagents in Meadowhall. The owner at the time was a gruff, blunt Barnsley bloke with a boxer’s physique; he’d left school without so much as a GCSE and slowly worked his way from selling posters at rock concerts to having his own market stall, then a shop, then a string of shops, and finally a lucrative line in property development. At the end of my first shift he gave me a lift home and the conversation turned to where I was studying. Barnsley College, he thought, or Sheffield Hallam if I was dead smart. No, I replied, I was studying at the University of Cambridge. The car fell silent for a while. By my next shift he had me shifting heavy crates to prove I wasn’t scared of hard work.

I’ve got tonnes of anecdotes like this one: my elderly piano teacher pleading that ‘you don’t forget about where you came from’; the schoolmates who saw it as a black mark of arch swottery; the great aunt who thought it meant I’d be Prime Minister before I was thirty. At every turn in my conversations about Cambridge, I encountered comments that portrayed it as a playground for privilege, snobbery & elitism. The sad thing is they weren’t far wrong.

Fast forward 9 months. It’s early in the morning and I’m drinking cut price booze in a dingy party room run by the students’ union. The guy pouring my drink conforms to all the right clichés: impeccably dressed, speaking in Received Pronunciation with the odd cockney flourish when he’s ‘out with the boys’, and a worldview that’s never known anything other than wealth and comfort. As he challenges me to a drinking contest he asks:

“Just what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at the University of Bradford or something?”

In his own mind, too muddied by drink to mask his prejudice, this comment made perfect sense: state school + local accent = less intelligent + less deserving to be here. I swiftly finished my drink and told him where to shove it.

This epic reminiscence all began after a friend forwarded an email exchange he’d had with a member of the Trinity College Students’ Union. The friend was objecting to an upcoming ‘Chavs & Toffs Night” where students get to dress up as their favourite object of derision, don Burberry and bling and mutter ‘know worra mean?’ and ‘yeah but no but’ in between belching about an essay they’ve got coming up. It is, quite simply, a celebration and affirmation of the middle class monoculture that now dictates our country’s discourse.

So now you know just how far up the social food chain you’ll find this insidious and mean-spirited mockery of the poor: it’s rife in the representations of our media, it bleats from the mouths of our workmates and it’s gleefully practiced in Britain’s best university by the future leaders of the land. Makes you proud, right?

This is all so dispiriting because, as someone who considers my time at Cambridge to be the best three years of my life and a time when I learned how to think, argue and write far better than I ever could’ve imagined, I know how positive it can be for smart, focused kids from non-traditional backgrounds to come here and develop the tools for successful careers. It really can be a place for social mobility, but that’s never going to happen at a college where the state school intake was recently a pathetic 42%, and it’s never ever going to happen when the student population’s hearts and minds are closed to the idea that poor people are people too.

In the end, this thing runs in a vicious cyle.

University admissions chiefs prefer public schoolers because they display a cockiness and verbal dexterity that’s not quite there in the smart but less well-prepared state school bunch.

State schoolers are smart enough to know this and figure they’d rather go to a bigger, more diverse and vibrant city than have to endure the cap-in-hand rigmarole of the admissions process and the university’s arcane, monochromatic traditions.

The privileged, public school intake interact with so few people from different backgrounds that they feel able to make prejudgements about them.

And the rest of the country continues to see the spite dripping from those dreaming spires and decides to spit some of that spite back at them.

The world rolls over and yawns.

The motto in the Trinity College dining hall is Semper Eadem, which is Latin for ‘always the same’. Such a shame that so many of its members embrace it as a slogan for living.

—–

Photos: #1 by Flickr user Tylluan, #2 by Malias (both Creative Commons)

External reading:

• There’s an interesting post on Labour Home about whether an affirmative action approach to university admissions based on the Texas model may see more state school kids in Oxbridge
• As always, Johann Hari has some interesting views on the subject of our mockery for the working class. Examples here and here

When a Conservative opposition starts attacking a Labour Government for its plans to raise the taxes of working class people, you know there’s something seriously fucking wrong with our politics. (Hat tip)

A few days after Shannon Matthews was found alive, hidden in the base of a divan bed in the home of her step-father’s uncle, this blog started receiving traffic from people searching for ‘Shannon Matthews conspiracy’ and ‘Shannon Matthews fake kidnap’. At the time I just dismissed it as a half-baked conspiracy theory based on little more than coincidence & a distrust of the poor. That position became a little harder to hold once the girl’s step-father was arrested on suspicion of viewing child pornography, harder still when two of his relatives were arrested, and now there are unconfirmed reports that Shannon’s own mother has been arrested. Could this be the first recorded instance of a conspiracy theory coming true? Watch this space.

Update: It’s been confirmed. This story couldn’t get more bizarre. From the BBC:

The mother of Shannon Matthews has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice.

Karen Matthews, aged 32, was arrested in Dewsbury late last night.

[...]

West Yorkshire Police said they did not expect to release any further details concerning the arrest of the 32-year-old woman until midday on Monday at the earliest.

25 years ago today, Ian MacGregor was named chairman of the National Coal Board.

I’m sure I would’ve felt differently had I been an adult 25 years ago, but with hindsight you could hardly fault the man for being good at his job. In decimating the mining population, MacGregor was only responsible for ruthlessly executing the will of Thatcher’s government. He wasn’t responsible for the picket line brutality of the police, the vilification of striking miners or the savaging of union rights. Nor was he responsible for the most heinous act of all: the failure to provide redundant miners with any adjustment programmes or job training schemes to help these overwhelmingly unskilled, manual workers learn the skills they’d need to find themselves another job.

The ultimate blame for these acts of governmental negligence and malevolence lies with Thatcher and her government, and shouldn’t extend too far beyond that.

It’s difficult to react substantively to Melanie Phillips’ frenzied hate speech, largely because most of the articles she writes substitute substance for vicious, fear-mongering missives against whomever she considers complicit in Britain’s societal collapse. Today’s screech of self-righteousness tries to turn the murder of Scarlett Keeling & the safe return of Shannon Matthews into a requiem for the death of family values. Specifically, she reheats the old arguments about absent fathers & the existence of an underclass:

The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.

But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.

An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied.

Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.

Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood.

How can such women know how to parent their own children?

Fuck knows; maybe they saw it on Jeremy Kyle. Of course, she can’t name one child who’s been bullied for having a father, and she can’t name one boy who would readily impregnate four girls without a second thought, and I doubt she’s even known three working class women from successive generations who’d validate her claim that they’ve never known love from their parents. Yet despite offering no evidence for these hysterical caricatures, we apparently have to take Phillips’ word for it that the working classes stew in a cesspit of animalistic iniquity, devoid of love or manners, decency or dignity. In Mel’s world, it’s a surprise Karen Matthews was even upset by her daughters’ disappearance, but no surprise that Shannon disappeared.

But whilst she’s happy to use so much energy dehumanising the victim and her family, the wider family of Dewsbury Moor and thousands of other families who try to make the most of a poverty and urban decay from which they can’t escape, she doesn’t do so out of unbridled spite. No, the Matthews’ are too pathetic a people, too small a target to deserve the full-on-Phillips hatchet job. What’s more worthy of her wrath? I don’t know why you had to ask:

Even though fractured family life vastly increases the risk of abuse, violence and murder, our deeply irresponsible overclass has put rocket fuel behind its exponential growth through tax and welfare incentives.

[…]

The people who are really culpable are all those who, intoning the mantra of “alternative lifestyle choice”, have defeated every attempt to shore up marriage and the traditional family.

In its place, they have deliberately and wickedly created over the years a legal and welfare engine of mass fatherlessness and child abandonment, resulting in a degraded and dependent underclass and a lengthening toll of human wreckage. (emphasis mine)

Expoilting a nine year old girl’s twenty four day disappearance, and in the process vilifying her family and an entire community, to microwave a set of by-numbers arguments against the welfare state. Vile, just vile.

Here are the facts: a little girl went missing for 24 days. Her family was worried sick. Her community was united in solidarity. With luck, hard work and a tireless police investigation, she was eventually found safe and well. Anyone trying to use this case to further their own agendas is just sick. From an earlier post:

Though it wasn’t widely reported in the national media, the people of Dewsbury Moor were magnificent. From the moment Shannon’s disappearance was publicised, hundreds of people dropped what they were doing to try to help. They combed the streets looking for her, organised marches to publicise her plight. They put up posters, made banners and pushed flyers into the palms of passers-by. People who on another day might’ve seen the police as an intrusive enemy put that to one side to volunteer any information they had. On modest resources, they did everything they could think of to help bring her back home. So much for ‘broken Britain.’

They did these things because, whether fractious or not, the complex social lives in this small, densely-populated community are what make it a community in the first place – nearly everyone knew someone who’d dealt with those associated with the Matthews family, whether it was Karen or Shannon, her father, step-father, grandparents, cousins or friends.

The right-wing press is already trying to frame the Matthews case as a sign of the moral & societal collapse of working class Britain. But they can’t have it both ways: if being poor is part of the reason why Shannon went missing, then it’s also responsible for outpouring of humanity, generosity and hard work that came as a response to it.

Everything else is just bullshit.

At the age of 11, I was briefly friends with a boy named James Mercer. James was a harmless, fidgety chatterbox of a kid; his learning difficulties meant he could never really concentrate in class, but he could still flash a grin so infectious you’d forgive the trouble he’d gotten you in by messing around in double English. James never spoke of his father; he lived with a mum who worked evenings in whichever local pub was short on staff and who fell in and out of relationships with the wrong men. Though he didn’t invite me very often, for the half-year we were friends I visited him in three different houses in parts of Sheffield and Barnsley, all of which were occupied by guys who bristled at his presence, never mind mine.

The last place they stayed in was a fairly new flat on the outskirts of Sheffield. There were no curtains up, the floors were unfurnished and the sparse décor suggested they wouldn’t be staying for long. I can still remember being in his bedroom, playing his computer games at full volume to drown out the slamming and shouting we could hear in in the front room. One day he told me his mum was taking him to London on a holiday and that I shouldn’t tell anyone at school because it’d spoil the surprise. It was the last time I saw him.

To accept that the personal lives of the poor can be messy and complicated is not to patronise or demean them, nor (unless you’re Alison Pearson or Melanie Phillips) is it to make some moral judgement on the lives they lead. In communities hamstrung by poverty & unemployment, poor housing, bad education, crime and drugs, relationships can be fraught and fleeting, and children will often grow up surrounded by a large cast of supporting actors. Fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins will all live close by, as will a step-father and his family, ex-boyfriends and their families. This large, informal kinship group might have their factions and grudges, bad blood and rotten apples, but if anything does unite them it’s the abiding affection for the children who threw them together.

After 24 days missing, 9-year-old Shannon Matthews was found in the home of her stepfather’s uncle; a victim, it would seem, of a family splintered by someone who didn’t have her best interests at heart. But if, in the rush to apply blame or make easy conclusions, we are to attribute her abduction to the complex and sometimes dysfunctional relationships among working class communities, we must also acknowledge that their unordered affairs also contributed to her being saved.

Though it wasn’t widely reported in the national media, the people of Dewsbury Moor were magnificent. From the moment Shannon’s disappearance was publicised, hundreds of people dropped what they were doing to try to help. They combed the streets looking for her, organised marches to publicise her plight. They put up posters, made banners and pushed flyers into the palms of passers-by. People who on another day might’ve seen the police as an intrusive enemy put that to one side to volunteer any information they had. On modest resources, they did everything they could think of to help bring her back home. So much for ‘broken Britain.’

They did these things because, whether fractious or not, the complex social lives in this small, densely-populated community are what make it a community in the first place – nearly everyone knew someone who’d dealt with those associated with the Matthews family, whether it was Karen or Shannon, her father, step-father, grandparents, cousins or friends.

The right-wing press is already trying to frame the Matthews case as a sign of the moral & societal collapse of working class Britain. But they can’t have it both ways: if being poor is part of the reason why Shannon went missing, then it’s also responsible for outpouring of humanity, generosity and hard work that came as a response to it.

This won’t be recognised, of course. But at least the people that matter – Shannon Matthews, her family, and the wider family of Dewsbury Moor, will all know the truth. And once the reporters have left & the cameras returned down the M1, that enduring truth will be the only thing that matters.

Were this blog ever to be hijacked by a bawling, belching, right-wing bigot, today’s episode of ill-informed invective would be brought to you by the following:

Having been completely infested with Jews, queers, femiNazis and forced-marriage Islamists, the liberal elites at the BBC have decided to descend from their ivory towers to poke, prod and mock the indigenous English working class as if they were caged beasts, only to be viewed from afar. Meanwhile, the job-snatching, benefit-stealing incomers get their pillows fluffed every night with immigrant-pleasing programming like the ‘BBC Asian Network’

When commissioning a series about the white working class, the BBC must’ve known that however well the programmes were made, the exclusionary focus on whites would work the far-right into a furious lather. This isn’t a reason not to show the programmes, of course, merely to ensure that the programmes themselves, and all the accompanying articles, segments and discussion pieces surrounding it are sensible, serious and nuanced.

So I don’t think there could possible be a worse journalistic gimmick than deciding to visit the whitest place in England:

This is Easington in County Durham, racially the whitest place in England and Wales according to the only reliable measure we have, the 2001 Census. You may have seen it in the cinema: it was the set for Billy Elliot, the story of a miner’s lad who joins the Royal Ballet. But it’s also the local authority where you are most likely to meet someone who is white and least likely to meet someone who is from any other ethnic background.

Of course, four million Polish immigrants could fill the town tomorrow and Easington would still be the whitest place in England, so that really doesn’t mean much of anything, now, does it?

Where Easington colliery stood, there is now virtually nothing. Just the jet black monument to a disappeared past, made from the cages that once took thousands of men underground. Face east and there is the cold North Sea. Look west and there are the streets and streets of cramped Victorian colliery homes, the inspiration for many a Geordie folk song. But the streets are not as they once were.

“Aye lad, an dunt figet the brass bands n’ whippets, the cobbled roads n’ Hovis commercials. Eee, them were grand days me boy!”

Before I get to the main point, I should, in the interest of fairness, include some of the saner voices the article quotes. Here’s Tommy Smith, an aged ex-miner:

“When I left school in the 60s you could say, I’ll go to the steelworks, or I’ll go to the pit. I went to the pit because all my family were there. There was always something for you, but look around the corner now, there’s nothing, that’s why you have the kids on the streets drinking.”

Ann Cowley, who runs a community centre in a nearby village:

“I think living in a village like this you cannot get away from the roots. The pride is still very much there. The grandparents who worked in the coalfields instil that pride in the generations that are coming after them. I think the sense of community values is very strong, the sense of pride in the heritage that has been the coalfields.”

The problem with this article (even if you ignore the slightly skewiff ethics of scouring the country in search of ethnic purity) lies in the fact that the message of the season, as advertised by the BBC, is that the white English working class is impoverished, malnourished, embattled and ignored. By seeking out the Whitest Place On Earth, the implication behind this article is simple: the whiter you are, the more real your problems. Talk about balkinizing the working class.

Photo: Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. Taken by Flickr user Stromberg, borrowed under Creative Commons license.

Update: So inevitable you could time your watch to it: The BNP’s Nick Griffin is scheduled to appear on Newsnight this evening to discuss the issues surrounding the series.

During yesterday’s tirade against decent dole recipient Andrew Anthony, I promised to link to some interesting posts both on the article itself and the issues surrounding it. Peter Ryley agrees that the article is patchy but reads it more as an indictment of middle class condescension/ignorance of the working class. He highlights this one saving grace towards the end, about an embittered old racist whose children have black partners:

Yet in Dave’s story, we see, even if he can’t, the hidden success of multicultural Britain. Not the tolerance and respect for separatism as preached by archbishops and playwrights, but the messy, difficult and tense business of living and loving together. It’s the children of people such as Dave who live cheek by jowl with new arrivals and adapt to rapid change. They are the ones who really embrace people from other countries and cultures by forming relationships and raising children together.

Meanwhile, the liberal arts community, for all its eloquence in anti-racism, is far more inclined to retreat to private schools and affluent enclaves, the better to maintain a homogenous culture while pronouncing on the benefits of diversity.

It’s a brilliant point that’s not made often enough: for all the talk of segregation, for all the small successes the BNP has in deprived areas and for all the talk of racism and racial tension, the white working class is, in fact, far more integrated than their more mild-mannered middle class superiors. We should give Anthony credit for making it, particularly given his subscription to a brand of liberalism that seeks to dismiss multiculturalism as a failure.

But what this doesn’t explain or excuse is firstly his ridiculous and faintly patronizing allusion to the working class’ lost ‘nobility’, and secondly his decision to take the article down the direction of multiculturalism in the first place. As someone who enthusiastically welcomes a debate on class, poverty and equality in this country, it’s so deeply dispiriting when the emphasis is placed on the quarrels and street skirmishes between different groups of poor people, rather than one of the many more important areas that affect all of these groups: unemployment, crime, education and the barriers erected by segregated religious schools, drugs, social housing, gang culture and our destructive youth, sexual health, health in general.

Over at Southpaw Grammar, the blame for not doing enough about these problems is laid squarely at the feet of the Labour government:

The problem i always find about debates around class is that the working class and the perceived ‘underclass’ are talked about and talked at, but never asked to talk themselves. The disdain for those people has always been apparent in the right wing, but i actually think the development of an underclass is more the fault of the ‘do-good’ liberal left.

The left have for too long allowed behaviour that is unacceptable be justified, it has cut out the working class from becoming Labour MP’s/AM’s and the like, and essentially strangled its voice for fear of being labelled ‘class warriors’ by their political opponents.

More:

I don’t think we need an attempt to target a ‘white’ working class, but the working class full stop. I have always find that class is a bigger divider than race or indeed nationality. That is why i have never been impressed by Plaid Cymru’s pitch even though they are truly centre left, the real divider is the have and the have nots, not the welsh have nots and the english have nots. At a time where increasing representation of all minority groups is thankfully on the agenda across the political parties, it is an outrage that there is no mention of getting ordinary working people of all races and creeds into parliament, for they are probably fast becoming the least represented in parliament at a time where politics is focusing on their plight.

So how can we work to re-enfranchise working people, bring them to the voting booth and make them feel like their voices are represented in Parliament? For me, the main hurdle is the country’s electoral maths. During the 70’s and 80’s Labour’s message seemed to be aimed squarely at its heartlands, but rarely played well in the middle class marginals of the south & midlands. Then during the 90’s, New Labour rightly took the votes of working class constituents as a given, embraced centrism and tailored its agenda to chime with voters in the very constituencies they’d failed to win over.

As a consequence, we now see a Labour Party that may still be doing some good work on behalf of working people, but doesn’t seem to speak to them anymore. Party membership is very low compared to 10 years ago, voter turnouts in working class constituencies keep falling and disgruntled, disaffected working people are still being attracted (though not yet in numbers that might spark panic) to the BNP.

I’ve probably wasted enough blogspace lamenting for one evening, but at some point in the future I’d like to write about two ways in which the Labour Party could revive both itself and its commitment to working families. One is a kind-of ‘Kossification’ of our politics; embracing the internet more as a tool for grassroots fundraising, organization and campaigning in a similar way to how US sites like Daily Kos operate. The other, perhaps controversially for someone who would otherwise align with Labour, would be the introduction of some form of proportional representation in our Parliamentary elections. We need each vote to matter once more, for politicians to tailor their campaigns to the country as a whole rather than the marginal constituencies we need to win. If we do that, we might stand a chance of bringing back some of the people who abandoned the cause, and possibly do more good for them in the process.